


Epiphany

by Dinmenel (PurvofPulchritude)



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-20 12:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 42,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3650895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurvofPulchritude/pseuds/Dinmenel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skyrim was a land of many songs. Some were long silenced, others long suppressed. The dragonborn sang at the Throat of the World, Alduin’s end, master of life and death, and she would listen to nothing, would give memory to no song but her own. But sometimes songs hear each other, remember themselves, and return.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Prologue**

That was the year the world screamed. Of pain and injustice, terror and triumph, liberty and anger, the cry rose in the proper place; in the shadow of the Throat of the World, Skyrim’s greatest mountain. That nation broke with the spring, blooming blood as its native Nords ripped away the clinging tendrils of a relic empire grown of their own seed but long since uprooted.

  
As any vine will claim fragments of the rock it climbs when cut loose, so there were those in Skyrim who thought unity more important than liberty – or, perhaps, who sighted a truer enemy in the distance. And so the clans turned upon one another and the legions marched, and the Nords donned their battle furs and cloaks of storm. And from grim Windhelm in the eastern sleet to high Solitude on the frozen marshes of the west, the roars of battle raged.

  
This in the hoarse gasp of an aborted apocalypse, for Alduin the World-Eater, wyrm of the end-times, was only newly slain by time’s ordained hero; Brital Stone-Stander, dragonborn. A mason, born of masons, she took up sword and shout in the fog-forests of Kreath, in southern Skyrim, when her dragon’s soul awakened and Alduin first took wing. For three years she stalked the north from Rift to Reach, hunting down and devouring dragons and all their power. Her voice was truth; what she spoke became real in the manner of dragons, historians, and Nord heroes of old. Some said she was really a man, but these she argued into a meaty pulp and fed to birds.

  
After many skirmishes and retreats, Brital forced the World-Eater into Heaven, and there she slew him with great relish. But though none of the assembled dead could understand why, this victory turned bitter in her maw, and she fled the field in anguish. For a time her way was lost, and those who knew her would say only that she trod all the paths of the soul, light and dark, forgotten and forbidden. In her absence, Alduin’s remaining kin ravaged the length and breadth of Skyrim, reclaiming their ancient crevices and eyries and tearing new treasures from the holdfasts of humanity. This was not a good time for mortals.

  
In the spring of that year, the dragonborn did at last return, grim and scarred and swimming with secrets. She withdrew to the heights of the Throat of the World, and there she spoke with a new voice, binding all dragonkind to roost with her above the earth. The wyrms removed, humanity wasted no time in turning upon itself, and screams of dragon terror turned to screams of human horror as the rebel king, Ulfric Stormcloak, led the children of the sky against the Empire. Both sides begged aid of Brital and her kin, but their only answer were the storms that gathered ever around the mountain’s peak. The dragonborn shouted ceaselessly there, running the world shimmer-thin with impressed reality, cracking the sky unto lightning and glimpses of Misrule. Her words were a constant rumble in every pass and pale of the north, threaded through with a keening wail just above hearing.

  
In autumn of the previous year, an Orc rose as Archmage of the Clever College in Winterhold; one Lagat Gra-Ushar. Nearly ninety and almost completely deaf, Lagat spent much of that spring and summer either soothing the dogs, cats, weasels, and rabbits made high-strung and uneasy by the dragonborn’s brooding or seated at her desk, penning a tome’s worth of letters in her slow, precise script. The rest of the time she could not be found, even by scrying spell.

  
These letters went out by imp-courier, winging their way across Skyrim and beyond, to be cast at the stoops of hovels, mansions, tents, ship cabins, and caves alike. Sometimes the imps thought to revenge themselves once their geas was broken by molesting either recipients or message, and sometimes the recipients thought of their own accord to skewer the courier for a convenient lunch, but they usually met no good end.

  
Those months saw many travelers on the roads to Winterhold and across the College’s gated bridge – of all cultures and creeds, even unto privateers and merchant princes of the south, but in race they were primarily Orcs. Alone or by couples, families, and even clans, they entered the College and made their honor-offerings to the Archmage, not even taking time to first tend the wounds taken from ambushing legions or Stormcloaks. Then they vanished utterly.

  
The students and teachers of the College both found this exceedingly unusual, but for all she still corrected their spellwork and scolded their unlaundered linens as she had since she was merely their Headmistress of Maids, Lagat had grown strange of late. So they noted the cattle and the anvils and the sacks of fungal inoculum hauled from the Orcish strongholds and thought they must have come to stay somewhere in the College, but they gave not a peep where the Archmage might hear or see (for she did read lips). Besides, they knew her to have dealt with demons and Psijiics and delved all the secrets of the Dwarven ruins beneath the earth. None were eager to question her.

  
Not even when, at midsummer’s height, she left the College entirely, stomping out on her own in the middle of a squall off the Throat’s spiraling storm-strands. She took the road as readily as she had ever done, and told none of those she left behind what errand demanded her personal and private attendance in the midst of a civil war.

  
The Nord rebels had gone to guerilla by then, pulling back to the high mountain passes, striking quick and hard from tiny, secluded villages where none knew or cared the names of the Empire’s Eight Divines. Only Windhelm, ancient seat of the Nord kings, still stood fast with them, and even it perhaps not for much longer. The Empire withered on the stone of its foundation, true, but its legions were fed and reinforced by southern farms spared the same dragon wrath that scourged Skyrim, and their Elven allies were more than happy to bolster their forces against entrenched Nord warbands with elite captains and wrath-wizards. The rebels bled, but so did the Empire’s legions, and land was gained and lost without any hard change.

  
The Empire’s generals schemed an end to the bloody stalemate as the summer died. Thalmor spies planted false reports of a major delivery of Imperial provisions scheduled to pass through Hammerfell and into Falkreath. When Ulfric’s bear-browed warriors fell upon the covered wagons in their full force, desperately hoping to cut off the Imperial supply routes, the gleaming shields and swords of legionnaires bit back with red relish, and general Tullius himself rode up from the Kreath to complete the ambush.

  
In the end, the rebels were slaughtered to a man, but with Ulfric’s voice at their forefront they rallied and left a trail of gore all the way down out of the mountains and into the misted vale. The legions stopped them finally in Falkreath town itself, but they too were broken on the will of desperate men. Two more armies were added to the Kreath’s great grave that night, and two nations laid low.

  
That same night, the Throat of the World fell silent for the first time in nearly nine months. Dragons and dragonborn turned their gazes from high upon the ruin that humanity had wrought, taking wing from the Throat down to Brital’s childhood fog-forests, bathed in new blood. The dragonborn walked amidst the carnage unto the corpse of Ulfric Stormcloak, and she lifted the Jagged Crown of dragonbone from his brow and replaced it upon her own. Any glee foreign powers might have had at the outcome of that battle was dashed then with a single word, as Brital Stone-Stander spoke, breathing new life into every broken body before her. Rebel and Imperial alike gave newborn fealty to her then, to their Dovahkiin and High Queen.

Screams of triumph and shouts of battle – a noisy land, is Skyrim, and that year most of all. Unkind to those with sensitive ears. But beneath the ground, through caves and ruins more usually filled with chorus and rhythm, a timeless silence crawled north to the king of a long repressed race. In the ancient subterranean cities of the Dwarves, a footless Falmer carried hope drawn from the well of the unknown.

  
We will begin her story much earlier, however, when she lay banished and alone in the decrepit Dwarven city of Rkund, far to the south. And although that was the year the world screamed, we shall end with its opportunity to weep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter One**

* * *

 

**Professor Taoiseach**

**University of Gwylim**

_Dearest Taoiseach,_

_My most profound apologies for the abruptness and length of pause in my correspondence; I was called urgently away from our debate on a matter of great academic importance. My field work in the Dwemer ruin of Rkund, south of Riften if you are not familiar, has unturned a find of some importance…_

\--- [Letters on the Epithalamium](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3674847/chapters/8125467)

 

* * *

 

     Admia could not sleep. There was no bedding for her there, where none had walked for generations. The halls were cold and dirty, the steam lines cut off or destroyed in some ancient collapse. Dust and debris dampened every gap. The bed shelf in one of the few intact chambers she had found was too small, and though the space held a perfect fifth, the walls were thick with the webs of a long-dead spider – she could not sleep there. So instead she explored, slipping out the warped door gongs with Par, her guide chaurus, clicking eagerly ahead. The doors had still been locked when she found the place, so there must be an access shaft the spider had used.

     She loped slowly across the low cavern outside her potential sanctuary, her chitin prosthetics quiet in earth made soft by the life and death of little things. This was one of their fields, of old, where the Deep Folk grew their fungal feasts. The fungi grew there still, though the Deep Folk were long gone, and fed creatures large and small, snuffling and squeaking all around. Even trolls, probably, because her earlier trill gave a clear echo from the stone above – which meant that any spiders that were there must be confined to places trolls couldn’t sneak into and pop their heads off. That was good; troll hides could make a warm bed. Not soft, but warm.

     The glowing footlamps led her to the collapse at the opposite end of the cavern, where their little fungal feet had climbed the pile of rubble and spilled into a ruined passageway. She kept one of her crutches hooked over Par’s ridged exoskeleton as they went forward; this hall was too dirty for a click or trill to tell her anything, and too damaged for even the emergency lanterns to remain.

     What she really needed was a passage to the surface. Troll hides could make a bed, yes, but they were rough and warty, not like bear, or wolf, or cat. In Summersgap she had had a full nest of the softest cat furs. Well, she was no longer bound by her quotas hunting trips to the surface. And out there – well, she could do no harm to her kin by it anyway. Perhaps… perhaps if she had a few cats tanned and softened in her nest, two or three weeks work, perhaps then she could sleep. If she could best them alone… but no matter; a little death in their skins or the greater death in their teeth.

     Admia and Par made slow progress through the ruined Dwarven hold. Almost every hallway in the upper levels was damaged, most beyond passage. They had to backtrack constantly, retreating lower in the ruins to try to find a different way to the surface levels. They had come in through old exploratory tunnels at mid-delve, and followed the nearly-vanished glyphs of the surveyors to the cultivation cavern. Admia checked periodically for more such markings, singing the twin-tone that would reignite the luminescence of the mushroom paint they used for secret warnings or directions. The glyphs were so old there that the radiating streaks meant to help catch attention were mere flickers, but she was able to find markings pointing toward the cruel upper air. Not that the air in those halls was so much better; they had been long without steam in their walls, long broken by the cold bones of the mountain.

     The air was never cold in Summersgap. There they had not just the Deep Folk’s steam but also their metal sun, and every wall and floor hummed easy heat. Even the lake was warm, run beneath with ancient metal rods none could swim near enough to touch. A better place than this ruin… at least it seemed relatively safe. Emeratis had warned her, though, when she left the waking world, that their ancestors’ reasons for leaving this hold unsettled went far beyond its decrepit state. He could not say why; he could only kiss her, and cover his ears to her eulogy.

     Several hours of back and forth and peering, face inches from the marked walls, Admia did at last find one of the delving shafts to the surface – and found it blocked by yet another pile of rubble.

     Sighing, she tapped Par’s shell with her crutch and crooned a patrol command, then slid down with her back against a large pipe protruding from the blockage. Her chin touched her chest and she jerked it back up; she could not sleep, sleep was death. She scooted around in front of the pipe’s broken end so that the frosty air drifting down from above breathed on her neck. She could probably climb up through there and find a port on the other side, but Par could not go with her – they were key when navigating the bewildering Endless Gap above – and she would not be able to bring anything large back with her. Such as a cat corpse.

     The wheezy whisper of mountain winds slid down the pipe, just audible. She must be fairly close to the surface, then, but she knew it didn’t matter; she could never dig her way through the blockage. She was strong, and Par could help, but her balance on two legs wasn’t good enough for that kind of heavy lifting. Besides, she was a chaurus pastor; she’d never been part of the tunneling crews and didn’t know their ways of safely shifting stone. There would be another way up. There would be.

     Beneath the wind, the rumbling growl of the Loud Mouth and her dragons grated on Admia’s ears. She could not sleep with that horrendous racket; who could? Even in Summersgap they had been troubled, stuffing their ears with bat wool to block out her terrible roars. Bad enough when she screamed in the sky; their ears had bled when she came shouting through the Gap itself. Loud enough to shout down the sun, and indeed she did; the buried lamp of the Gap had dimmed with each day after she shattered its shell until it was nothing but a cold, silent husk, sloughed of all its unfolding tones. They would call it Wintersgap, soon.

     A distant rhythm; something was tapping in the hall above. And voices, then, too rounded and creased by the pipe to distinguish, but definitely voices. Sky robbers. God heard ever tale of the treasures that were theirs in the Endless Gap, the succulent meats, the honeys and milks, but they always came to plunder the tables of the Falmer. Sometimes alone and sometimes in packs… sometimes with crude tools for the excavation of earth. Crude, but perhaps still useful, if they meant to clear that hall.

     Admia untied the silk straps securing her prosthetics to her thighs and laid her crutches at the base of the pipe; neither would help with _this_ climb. Then, leaving Par to scuttle their perimeter idly, she scooted through the sheared metal end and, bracing with her knees and back against the sides, began methodically hoisting herself up into the pipe. There was a bit of a squeeze at the top, where the collapse had bent the metal narrow, but a bit of a wiggle and she was through to the intact line beyond. Flipping to her hand and knees, she crawled up the low incline until she found an access port. She triggered the lever to open it, then lodged her knife between the doors and laid her ear close.

     The voices were a ways back toward the cave-in, but there she could better tell their make; Atmorani, singing one of their loud, brash, keyless tunes. She tilted her head; intermingled was a higher voice, tenor or countertenor, and with the timbre of one of the mer languages closer to her own. She couldn’t understand what either of them were saying, of course; no one spent enough time up above to learn Atmorani, and the tongues of mer had turned strange and degenerate since the Falmer retreated from that world. At best she knew one word in twenty of that one’s speech – she could make out nothing but sour intervals from the Atmorani.

     But if she could have, it would have gone something like this.

 

* * *

 

[ **_Thunder!_ ** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM)

****

**_I was caught in the middle of a werewolf pack!_ **

**_I looked around and I knew there was no turning back_ **

**_My mind raced, and I thought, what could I do?_ **

**_and I knew there was no help from you_ **

**_The sound of drums beating in my heart_ **

**_The thunder of the moons tore me apart_ **

**_You’ve been – thunderstruck!_ **

****

**_Ran down the White River, broke the gates, we hit the town_ **

**_Went through to Helgen, oh Helgen, and we had some fun_ **

**_We met some girls, some witches who gave a good time_ **

**_Broke all the rules, played all the fools_ **

**_Yeah yeah, they, they blew our – minds_ **

**_And I was shakin’ at the knees_ **

**_Could I come again please_ **

**_Yeah them hagmaids were too kind_ **

**_You’ve been – thunderstruck!_ **

****

**_Thunderstruck! Thunderstruck! Thunderstruck!_ **

****

The men fell back from their taut-throat screams, faces red and covered in happy sweat as Hulgar worked the last, long note on his lyre-guitar, arched over the tiny fire. His copper beard blazed in the glow, his eyes gleeful little thunderstorms of shadow.

     “A classic, Hulgar, a classic,” guffawed burly black Bromgartr, wiping his glistening forehead and leaning on the drum between his knees. Hulgar had played the song or one like it every night since they had taken on with the elf, and Bromgartr had lauded it as a ‘classic’ every time. Well, he appreciated tradition – especially tradition in good fun. Hulgar’s nephews – the two baby-faced boys still in suspenders and silky lip-down, did _not_ appreciate tradition – at least not _recent_ tradition, but they did appreciate good fun.

     “Classic or not, a good song!” cried Raddin as he sat up. “A true Nord song!”

     “Played by a true Nord!” Mendre winked in at his uncle as he settled out on his belly next to the fire.

     Hulgar crinkled a smile at them all as he settled back down onto one of the camp chairs arranged around the fire. They were good boys. He ignored the silence from the elf, hunched like some jaundiced stork over his notes, rude as it was; everyone knew to pay a bard in compliments, if nothing else! But the elf had done nothing different every other night since hiring them.

     They were mining men, lured away from the ebony mines at Shor’s Stone by the elf’s coin. A contract job only, if they could convince Foreman to let them back. Foreman did not truck with elves; he had run this one off with a rusty hoe when he came asking to hire out good miners. For that matter, his nephews did not truck with elves either – Hulgar had had to seriously talk up the gold to convince them to join the job. Strange talk they had, whispered about where their conservative Uncle could – supposedly – hear. Well, they had their points, but Hulgar had been brought up believing they were all equal Imperial citizens. Different times – dead times, perhaps…

     “Another, Uncle, another,” demanded Raddin, shaking Hulgar out of his flame-trance.

     “And what’ll it be then?” he answered, strumming brightly. “Another hellraiser?”

     “No, something easy,” said Mendre. His eyes were gone low-lidded with the heart.

     Bromgartr nodded. “Her Name,” he said with a quiet grin; another classic. “Her Name for the night.”

     So Hulgar breathed deep, closed his eyes, and let his fingers breeze across the strings.

 

[ **_Well the moons moved past the mountains_ ** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_enljD4380)

**_and spilled laughter on the cold Reachwind hills_ **

**_Angels danced the broken stairs, they danced the broken stairs_ **

**_There is this silence in the Riftwoods_ **

**_And over Whiterun the whole Mundus is stilled_ **

**_by the whisper of a prayer_ **

**_The sacred hawk bursts into flight_ **

**_and in the east the whole horizon is in flames_ **

****

**_feel thunder in the sky, see the sky about to rain_ **

**_and hear the Greybeards calling out Her name_ **

****

**_You can feel the earth tremble ‘neath the rumble of mammoth heels_ **

**_and the joy in a wind-whale’s roar - the joy in a wind-whale’s roar_ **

**_They tell you that Kyne is in her temple_ **

**_and there is still a faith that can make the mountains sing_ **

**_and a Love that can make the Heavens ring_ **

**_As we’ve seen Love make Heaven ring_ **

**_where the sacred steel shines_ **

**_beneath the shadow of Skyforge’s wings_ **

****

**_feel thunder in the sky, see the sky about to rain_ **

**_and hear the Greybeards calling out Her name_ **

****

**_From the place where Greybeards gather_ **

**_you can look sometimes forever till you see_ **

**_what time may never know – what time may never know_ **

**_How Kyne takes by its ears this old world_ **

**_and Shouts us forward and Shouts us Free_ **

**_To run wild with the hope - to run wild with the hope_ **

**_The hope that this thirst will not last long_ **

**_that it will soon drown in the song not sung in vain_ **

****

**_And we know that this thirst will not last long_ **

**_that it will soon drown in the song not sung in vain_ **

****

**_feel thunder in the sky, see the sky about to rain_ **

**_and with the Greybeards we are calling out Her name_ **

 

* * *

 

     She shook her head to clear their terrible twin-tones from her ears. Could Atmorani even _hear_ themselves? Had some terrible disease afflicted their ears? She’d heard it before, but it still shocked her to know that _anyone_ could shape sound so poorly.

Horrible vowels aside, it was obvious to Admia what the Atmorani were about: looting, and clearing the downward delves to do it. She gave them four days to have it done, as Atmorani moved stone – four days to the surface, three days to hunt and slay a sword cat, two weeks for tanning. Three weeks, and then she could sleep. In three weeks she would be dead _without_ sleep, but what did that matter? In Summersgap she had rolled naked in a nest of silk and downy furs; in Summersgap Emeratis had rolled her in the silken burial shroud and placed her atop Par’s back himself. In Summersgap her own son had put the sleeping potion to her lips and sung her eulogy as all her kin mourned her passing. Far from Summersgap, she awoke with Par in the empty tunnels to this ruined hold, the slumbering dead to any who might meet her. Death was sleep; _she was not dead_ , she could not sleep.

     But sleep she did, there in the walls of ruined Rkund, lulled by the rhythm and rhymes of worshiping Nords.


	3. Chapter Two

** **

**Chapter Two**

 

_Many thanks to Aranarkus for use of the definitive history of the Dwemer presented in the Archives._

* * *

**** _Clan Khurakem secured their position in the Western Holds by remaining with the Tenziim when the Old Clan splintered. This loose partnership came to benefit both groups as the years passed. The Trengnthaen, and later Tenziim, gained a more substantial support-structure. The Khurakem gained a degree of patronage and were largely responsible for expanding the mines beneath FalZhardum Din. They later aided in the construction of Alftand and Irkngthand. After the Falmer civilization was shattered by the Altmorani, the Khurakem came to fill the role of slave-masters for the other clans. They were largely responsible for transporting and maintaining the enslaved Falmer. They were also responsible for breeding and culling the population in turns after the blinding of that race. When the Falmer rebelled shortly after the Aetherium Wars, the Khurakem became their primary opponents._

\--- Excerpts from the Archives of Nchararaan 

* * *

There was too much to do! There was her room to clean, the walls unwound of their clinging silks around her depth staff, though she managed to also wind _herself_ in the process – silk collection was another job Admia had never had to do. There were the floors to sweep of their thousand-year dusting with a leftover silk swath, and the brass ceiling to be hammered back into its resonance from the warp of stone shifted over long years. A perfect fourth rose light and airy from the freshly tuned walls when she sang the choral base of priesthood at its polished epicenter, eyes closed and head tilted back as it arched from the extant fifth, holding her own notes cupped on her tongue. No one to share their daily hymns with her, there, as the song begged, but the room sang beside her and that was good.

     There were the chaurus eggs to nest and tend; Par’s siblings, left tucked in her burial shroud by her family so that she could raise an usher of chaurus of her own. She laid the eggs just outside her door gongs, cushioning them in spider silk. She would tune them every few hours so that when they hatched they knew her voice and would welcome her presence. Normally there would be a great culling amongst them until only a few of the strongest emerged, large enough and intelligent enough to train, but with so few eggs she would have to be careful to keep the siblings separate until their infant competitiveness abated. Then there would be the training, with careful drippings of blood reward and weeks of tedious association. That, at least, she knew she could do without tangling herself in it; she had been a pastor for a hundred years before she found God. Once established, the usher would provide her protection, tools, armour, food, and friendship.

     In the meantime, though, she would have to rely on other sources, so there was the smokehouse to build of cobbled rubble, cemented tight with a past of ground rocks and Par’s acidic spit. Raw-warm and bleeding was best of course, no matter what the meat, but it would spoil too quickly for her to eat; a few days in the smoke of woody mushroom muscle and she could keep as much as she needed – hung in the access shafts where no trolls could get to them, naturally. That done, there were the rats and bats to stalk and skin, first shaving the bats of their wool to save for padding of her nest, and their carcasses to hang for curing in the smoke. She did find the scat and holes of trolls nearby, but that trial she would leave until she felt more confident of the ground.

     Then there were the fungi to gather and grind, adding to the paste pots they had left in her shroud. Those had many uses, from the cleaning of teeth to the poulticing of wounds. Not the least use was a quick, tasty snack while prowling about. Another task; she had to learn the layout of the ruins well enough to navigate without Par there to guide her, just in case they fell afoul of accident or enemy. She spent long hours pacing the ruined halls and caverns in every possible path, drilling her recall until she could either feel or hear landmarks at every intersection. No rhythm, steam hum, or gap tones to help her, as there were in better preserved holds, but by the time the Atmorani broke through the blockage at the delving, Admia was confident she could lead them a baffling chase if she needed to.

     And then there was her privacy to worry about – she could not have Atmorani stumbling upon her infant usher and sanctuary. Well, she had no idea how the spinners made webs into cloth, but she could string the silk she had collected across the broken halls leading to her cultivation cavern. Better would be to block them up with rubble, but she could not handle that kind of work on her own.

     They made their camp in the first intersection clear of rubble past the delving when they finally did break through, surrounding their nests with large wooden carts filled with crates. Admia listened to and watched them from behind corners and within walls, even though they threw searing lights everywhere and roared constantly, like raging trolls. She had lived in Summersgap for many, many years; she knew how to squint out the sun. A little bat wool in her ears kept her able to hear at the end of the day.

     There were five of them; four towering humans and one elf, even taller than the others, but not nearly so fat. Most of the humans were basses, with maybe one baritone; the mer was tenor. The humans kept close to their stabbing fire, huddling away from the comfortable dark of the hold and speaking often in the cant of stories. They were never comfortable in cave or hold-hall, Atmorani, and they well deserved not to be; they belonged to the Falmer, and the Falmer knew the Atmorani as their ancient scourge. Admia knew them for enemies even more deeply than most; their fear was wisdom.

     The mer, though, was not so leery; they wandered here and there about the camp, muttering lowly as they bent over bits of rubble or reliefs on the walls. A crown of spectral lights hovered around their head, dripping a diffuse golden mantle. They would be the Clever one, Admia supposed; the Atmorani were not much for learning, in the stories and songs, but their few who did manage some form of intellect and magical ability managed it very roughly toward the Falmer. Plucking the wool from one ear, she cocked her head and listened carefully through the din – but, no, she could not hear the anguished whispers that Loud Mouths carried everywhere with them. The barbarians actually made _belts_ of their enemies’ _tongues_ ; she’d heard one in the museum in Summersgap.

     Loud Mouth or no, the Clever elf would no doubt be the one leading the rest to the hold’s treasures. So it would be them she would need to fool, when it came time to evict them from her gap. Their crude tools and labor would be useful for some time still, though – Admia had explored every accessible part of the hold, including those halls and rooms still reachable _only_ via hatch or broken pipe, and none of them presented a way down to the lower delves. There _were_ lower delves; she had heard the hiss of steam and the rhythmic clink of gears through the walls of the deepest shafts. The central systems were still playing, far below and long forgotten.

     So then there were the invaders to keep under watch and ware, finding time in the midst of everything else to regularly mark their progress. She kept to the ductwork for that, clambering and climbing her rounds through the hold, ears alert. Atmorani were stupid, but they had an uncanny awareness; the stories said they could sense a Falmer’s passing even if they had gone a week before. Admia had followed the old wards against this dirty warlockism, beating the memories of her passing out of the floors with a swath of spider silk wrapped around the ends of her crutches.

     Even with her subtle guidance – a half-buried cog here, an enticing old book there – it took them an entire week of hopeless meandering and silly dilly dallying to find their way to the almost completely collapsed hallway Admia _thought_ would lead to the lower delves via the hold’s tympanum; the central chamber the Deep Folk had used for food and booze and talk. The doors were entirely buried in rubble, but not enough to block the whirr and beat from beyond.

     They had already broken through when she slid down the wall shaft to check their progress; their voices echoed and boomed on the high ceiling of the tympanum. Grinning fiercely, Admia popped open the nearest port and hopped out into the glare of their abandoned torches. Closing her eyes – that close, it was painful even flesh-veiled – she fumbled her crutches and feet from the shaft, tying them hurriedly on and clicking on all fours through the twisted door gongs.

     She paid no mind to the Atmorani or the tones of the tympanum, instead darting immediately to the wall beside the entrance and feeling for what she knew would be there; a double row of notched grooves, marching straight up the wall. Meant for the spidery tuning constructs the Deep Folk had used to tend and repair their gaps, they served just as well as holds for the sharp tips of her chitin crutches and feet. She scaled the wall swiftly and pulled herself onto a narrow lip of stonework running the perimeter of the room.

     Admia circled round, away from their echoing shrieks of greedy glee, until she met the incline of a doorway’s stone jamb. She had to step slowly and carefully; her feet were not so steady without crutches, and there was little room for that on the ledge. She dragged the tip of one along the wall until it clicked into a tuner’s groove, then lowered herself to the floor and slipped between the metal doors. She closed them silently, putting away the Atmorani caterwauling and sinking deep into the white noise of the Dwemer hold, the regular hiss and hum of pumping steam, the rhythmic click of gears, the rumble of dynamos. A brief breath, almost too fast to even enjoy, anymore, and it all melted into the limpid sweetness of the hall’s enveloping overtones. Still in tune, too; the spiders’ behavioural matrices had not degraded here, then. Some places they had, and there the Falmer had to correct the shift of metal and stone themselves to attune the hold’s architecture.

     Those notes were lead strings to Admia, for the Deep Folk had selected the chords of their halls informatively, based on the function of the rooms or wings they connected, and the raised ceilings at intersections added extra partials indicating the junctures. Each room would have its characteristic hidden tones, too, usually based on the primary function of the space. This was something Falmer had never managed to master, studying the Deep Folk’s remnants. Automata even were theirs to command, now, but this thing of hiding notes in blank space – that they had never replicated in their own gaps, however well they had learned to hear them.

     Beauty and convenience aside, the hold itself was the real danger for Admia, then. Animunculi – the metal constructs the Dwemer had used to tend and defend their homes – would still be pacing out their rounds, thousands of years after their masters had vanished, and Admia would have to find their harmonic emanator’s propagation chamber – the attunement shell – before she could sing herself into their recognition records. And there was no skulking through the walls down there – the tuners would be asleep at their bays within the shafts, or moving along them.

     Adding the click of her crutches to the white rhythm underlying the chord corridor, Admia loped off into the hold. A few taps at the pipe choir arrayed near the intersection’s key change told her that basic facilities – the refectory, living chambers, performance halls – were _that_ way, and access to the hold’s primary support systems – typically well pump, oil reservoirs, aerator, animonculory, and, most importantly, the attunement shell – were _this_ way. She headed toward the latter; there were automata to attune to her presence. She could not defend herself against an entire clan-hold’s centurions, even if Par had been there to help.

     She _could_ manage one or two, however; as she stepped a swung 2/4 down the hall, she heard the clatter and whirr and almost-there overtone accompaniment of a [mechanical cleaning crew](http://imgur.com/a/ratQG). The busy fwip-fwap of the dust sentry came first, followed by the moan and splash of the polishers. Last would be the steamer – they always tagged along in hangdog fashion, they had long since steamed the rugs and wall hangings to tatters.

     They were on her before she could sing or even hide. The dust sentry let out a wailing steam-shriek, oscillating as it spun in place madly. Admia ignored it – those automata weren’t any danger of themselves. But the guards that would come rolling from the walls in response to their alarm…

     She picked up her pace, darting hastily through the quavering harmonies, stopping only momentarily to check the key at intersections. She thought she had probably outpaced the immediate response, but spheres would be on patrol in nearby corridors for some time after the alert. And indeed she met several pairs, rolling clamorously along with their ominous minor thirds blaring, but she peppered them with a befuddling song of pops and irregular intervals, filled with tremolo to scramble their metal eyes and ears. She slid past their confused circling with no trouble. An old song, that one. Learning to attune the Deep Folk’s automata was a very _new_ thing, but _managing_ them was very, very old.

     The centurions outside the attunement shell would not be so easily taken care of, however. Admia held back to the closest corner, listening carefully. It sounded like just two spheres guarding the entrance; she heard none of the giants’ polyphonic wheezing. Deactivating them was not good, but she would have to if she wanted inside. No time to waste; she leaped out of hiding, screaming twin-tones into the centurion’s sensitive receptor gems. Not enough to do any damage, of course, but it put them off-balance enough that she could lodge each of her crutches beneath their metal shells and give a good wrench. They parried quickly, whirring their sword-ended arms at her, but she was of long experience with metal mer and their every clinking gear and clanking ratchet betrayed them. A methodical fight, really – like tapping the chaurus to keep them in herd. A few minutes later and they were but scraps of metal on the ground, their gem transceivers pried free by Admia’s deft crutches, and the footless Falmer opened the door gongs and stepped into the attunement shell.

     Admia would not have been able to see the whole of that room even had the gas lamps burned above their emergency baseline, but she knew its layout well. Emeratis had sketched the Summersgap attunement shell out for her long ago, trying to explain how it worked, and this was one room that almost never varied among holds.

     The first sensation was always sound – the harsh electric blare bolting from tone to tone, swirling with harmonics wailing awake from pipe and snare and sacred crystal geometries and subsuming into the song instants later, there and gone again in the synthetic orchestral storm. Then there was the sight; not the dim blue gas lamps on the walls but the flickering violet flash-strands caressing the walls like wisps of charged hair. They traced the bars of the metal cage surrounding the area just inside the entrance, but did not enter, though they freely feathered all the rest of that shallow bowl of a room. They arced from a large brass ovoid in the center, crowned in a luminous wire coil. The entrance let onto an area sunk beneath one sector of the bowl’s edge, from which brass catwalks extended up into the rest of the room, dodging between the ring-choir arrangement of metal pipes, planes, cubes, pyramids, and tori, each hinged or ported so as to leave a variable vent. Eight hollow crystal polyhedrons spun slowly around the central egg on brass armature, a mini-model of the Endlass Gap’s god-bodies.

     Admia stuffed her fingers in her ears as she hurried to the waist-high aether instrument next to the cage’s sealed access door; the attunement shell was useful, but too _loud_. She set aside her crutches momentarily and positioned her hands precisely in the air around the instrument’s two protruding wire loops. The air sang at her touch, long-lonely, and she played the deactivation and entrance melodies as Emeratis had taught her. The lightning stopped; the room went silent and dark. Leaving her crutches for the moment, Admia stepped carefully through the opened gap in the protective cage and made her way to the metal ovoid in the center of the room, tracing her hand on the catwalk’s rail for guidance. Ozone touched her tongue, acrid and sharp.

     Eight panels unfolded from the ovoid as she approached, revealing a hollow core. She knew what would be inside; the eight aether hummers arrayed around a glass orb filled with water. Submerged therein, the record – a black orb or illumination, supported below by a metal rod but disconnected from the corresponding rod above. When active, both rods contacted the orb.

     Admia pressed her face near the glass as she clinked inside the ovoid. She always liked to admire the record. Composed of some unknown stone, it was blacker than sleep and filled with pinpricks of scudding multilayered light. That was the score for all the hold’s automata; it told them what to do, and when. By editing it, Admia could hack herself – and all Falmer – into their recognition matrices.

     She trilled swiftly through the initiation tune, rolling the twin-tones in her mouth, and the ovoid’s panels swung up, sealing her inside. Not even emergency lights, there; they weren’t needed for hand humming, the record’s primary form of interface. Pushing aside the mechanical web of wire fingers that played the hummer in the absence of a real person – Emeratis thought they were what controlled the automata throughout the hold, a sort of communicative relay – Admia laid her fingers gently in place within the aether hummer’s sensors and began to play.

     A new song, that one; very new. Filled with lurking harmonies and submelodies, shifting and darting, minor but exploratory, probing toward the burgeoning cadence of hope. Not her song, of course; Emeratis was the composer, she a listener and singer. Singing was part of it, too, not merely humming, and as she raised her twin-toned voice she felt the ovoid respond; panels along its inner shell shifted to shape the space into her chosen harmonics.

     As she played, tiny sparks of blue-white light began to flare within the record’s glass orb, visible only because it was so dark. The first movement rounded off and the second sprang to its fleet feet, and the lights came faster, fuzzy flashes living and dying instantaneously, leaving only their memories imprinted on Admia and the black depths of the record. Movement three and the ovoid’s panels reopened to free the song’s resonance to the rest of the shell, where it worried the pipes and polyhedra into harmonic whistles, stretching, shifting, dilating, and dropping to add twelve more layers to the music. The record wore a sprinkled mantle of twisting liquid-light.

     Then the last movement, bombastically hopeful, finally major, and the upper rod slid down to contact the sphere, activating the magicka coils crowning the shell. A floating mane of lightning drifted throughout the room, belying the harsh drone of its tones, and every cavity in the shell quaked with its partial, gone beyond hearing for Admia though her ears itched with its present absence. That sound was for animunculi alone, in the aetherial overtones that shaped their world. The record fairly glowed, a numinous nimbus.

     Finally the disengagement melodies, soft, hopping gently here and there, the lightning coil cooling, the record going dark. Admia stepped away from the hand hummer, breathing deep. How many times had she practiced that, in Summersgap, Emeratis tapping conduction by her side? Different days. A different life.

     The record now contained an imprint of Admia and Falmer in general, as her wife had designed in more hopeful years. The hold’s animunculi would no longer attack her or raise alarm at her presence, though she would not be able to command them directly. No one had yet written _those_ songs.

     Yes, she would be safe from the metal mer, at least, but there were still the Atmorani to deal with. She clinked back out of the attunement shell, stopping to reactivate its normal, automatic functions and collect her crutches, and loped off through the hold’s quavering chord-corridors… into the tones of her newly-conquered Gap.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Three**

* * *

 

_[…] Some months ago, my workers excavated the remains of what we believe to have been the facility's primary meeting hall. The diggers were able to extract several unique items before being forced to seal off the excavation;_ _chief among these items were a series of personal Dwemeri notebooks of a type hitherto unknown to modern archaeology. Unfortunately, extensive Falmeri presence necessitated suspension of further efforts…_

\--- Letters on the Epithalamium

* * *

 

     The Atmorani enjoyed none of the immunity Admia had garnered for herself; even by the time she had returned to the tympanum they had raised an alarm and engaged themselves in primitively bashing the responding metal mer into pieces with their hammers and picks. The discordant clanging jarred in her ears as she scaled the wall and settled in on a dark, safe perch to listen to their progress. The fools set up their nests in the tympanum itself, of all places, where there were automata access ports every few feet in the walls. The elf tenor called down monsters to defend it – the Atmorani were notorious in their devil-worship, consorting with demons of all kinds dredged up from the silent wells of the Endless Gap; all the old songs spoke of this. Some even said they would seduce or coerce such fiends into copulation, like they did with wyrms. She had no idea how they expected to sleep with those evils smashing shields with the centurions and growling incessantly out of key.

     When they had finished transporting their looting paraphernalia into the chamber and settled into some kind of ease – it still involved a lot of yelling – Admia descended from her perch and sneaked out of the room. She no longer needed the Atmorani, and could not transfer her belongings from the upper cavern as long as they remained, but she was alone; she would need full understanding of her Gap and its resources in order to evict the looters. She swept through the singing corridors, passing animunculi without issue and mapping the layout’s key changes and signatures to a formulaic choral cartography as her father had taught her long ago. That part of the Gap seemed to have largely escaped the destruction above; the corridors and chambers were richly resonant, unmuffled, clean.

     The animonculory hummed along without hitch, and the aerator still burned brightly, fed by its twelve tubes of rushing water. Not surprising – she’d heard many automata in fine repair, and the air was too fresh for a faulty circulatory system, but she went to sit in the breeze of the vents outside it anyway. Who didn’t enjoy the high of fresh air? The rest of the systems seemed to be singing as they should as well – emergency lighting had probably engaged purely from disuse – and perhaps the initial trauma above. She found a suite of agricultural caverns with natural drip irrigation from the stabbing stalactites; seven in total, unusually many. Fully functioning, too, the fertilization plows trundling deeply along their hanging rails, footlamps butoning up from the compost. The silo shafts overflowed with fungi of every kind, and the overwhelmed farm automata had even taken to using bedrooms and workshops as storerooms. She was nearly buried in plump helmets when she opened a repair depot near the caverns. After that, she made sure to tap door gongs for proper resonance before opening.

     There was only one odd thing – the refectory. Admia found it last in her circuit of the hold, somewhere mid-levels beneath the tympanum. The ovens and stones still burned their low green glow, and sous-chefs still diced and sliced pointlessly at their counters, but there was none of the normal clatter and roar. Not even the rhythm and hum of the hold’s underlying machinery penetrated there, and certainly not its harmonics. The kitchen operated in eery silence. Admia could barely find her way through it; even her clicks and trills were muffled, swallowed by the very air.

     She stumbled into a low stone wall as she crossed the room; fumbling, she accidentally jerked a metal lever, and warm water burped out onto her legs. A well, and from the mineral tang she smelled when she leaned over the wall, a well directly open to the cisterns. But she could hear no rush of the working pumps, or the whirr of the purifiers. There was just… silence. Deep and empty. The silence of sleep, of ancient wells of death, of Zasha when –

     Admia pushed herself away. It could not be _that_ , _that_ should not be there. That was nothing of the Deep Folk. They remembered little enough of what had once been, but they remembered that. The Dwemer had been a loud people, as loud as the Atmorani albeit more subtle. Emeratis often – _had_ often complained of having to prune rests into their frenetic compositions. They had not known how to hear silence, or how to use it. And certainly not how to pool it, like _that_ , all sound flowing down, down into the well’s depths to warm, languid leisure…

     Admia smacked her hands sharply across her ears to set them ringing against the silence’s sweeping current. It should not be! She stumbled away, bruising her shoulder on the edge of a counter and stubbing her toe as she struggled out of the tug. Finally she pulled herself through the door-gongs and slammed them closed. Out in the normal undertoned chord-corridor, surrounded by the rhythm of gears and harmonic hiss of steam, that silence seemed hardly possible, barely true. She hadn’t actually felt anything strange, it was just shocking to find a quiet room. She was dehydrated; she should have drunk from that well. That completely normal, echoing well. And yet – she took a long swig from the brandy bladder at her waist, filled with water from the broken irrigation pumps by her makeshift shelter in the ruins above.

     She loped through the kinrooms and performance halls and workshops surrounding the refectory. What she needed was a way to scare away the Atmorani, but, come as they were for the sole sake of stealing Dwemer treasures, they were not likely to be run off by anything of the Deep Folk. Unless it killed them, but Admia had no hunger for that, anymore. A few Atmorani dead there in her Gap; what would it serve? Falmer would still cower in their cramped gaps from the horrible Loud Mouthery above, and the Atmorani would still fly free in their Endless Gap. And a few more voices would sing alone for nothing.

     There was one way… her grandbass had told her a story about routing an entire pack of Atmorani from Buttongap when they were only a little monster. If she could find enough of those constructs, maybe… She searched every room she found, even the wasterooms, for the more haphazard of automata were apt to wander into the most unlikely places. It took hours of looking, but she did at last hear what she wanted; in the organ pit of one of the smaller performance halls, all clustered together and blaring harried melodies at each other obnoxiously. They were some of the more harmless animunculi, just scuttling disks supporting flaring metal horns to blast their recorded music, with a large glass orb between prickling with dim light in response to the song. She stuffed wool in her ears as she made her way down to them, grinning. They were exactly what she needed.

 

* * *

 

     The Altmer sat on a stone bench a short way down one of the halls outside of the camp where Hulgar and his nephews bunched with their backs to the flames, wary of the Dremora she had conjured to dispose of any leftover enraged animunculi. The Nords were superstitious and ignorant, but they did their jobs wonderfully – and Hulgar was nothing bad as a bard, either. The dremora were an excessive precaution by that point, really; a week into her excavation, most of the initial resistance had been met and dealt with; she had renewed the bindings merely to allay the Nords’ unease at being away from the sky in a hostile ruin. More effective had been the seals she placed on the doors and access ports; a minor conjuration of creatia accreted within the hinges and joins to prevent movement. A small thing, but it did require constant upkeep; the spiders kept picking away at the blockage.

     She wiped the nib of her pen and blow on the page of her journal to dry the ink, wrapping up the summary of the day’s events and sketches of notable findings. Surprisingly, considering the terrible devastation of the upper levels, this part of Rkund was better preserved than most other Dwemeri ruins she had investigated. The animunculi still seemed to be on low alert – at least, before the excavation began – focusing on hospitality functions rather than defense. Serving meals, for instance; the tables of the central hall had been laden with a shocking variety of mushrooms cooked in every manner imaginable when they found it. Probably because it had been entirely untouched since the First Era, cut off by the collapse above – most other ruins had seen thousands of years of plunder and research and had gone into deep, permanent defensive alert in response. In many, the animunculi had gone so far as to engineer vicious traps for the unwary. They were clever things, quick to learn, if nowhere near as clever as their masters had been.

     A hesitant clicking sounded from the darkness behind the Altmer, and she twisted back in alarm. Yet another angry spider or sphere? She thought the dremora had reduced most of them to bent gears already. As she turned, a bright light flared up, blinding them momentarily – _that_ was certainly no function of spider centurions, but she had no time to figure out what it _could_ be before the construct scuttled up and snatched the cherry-bound journal from where it fell as she flung up her hands in front of her eyes. She shrieked - that book had every sketch and observation she’d made in the last week! – and sprang to her feet, chasing down the nefarious automaton as it clattered wildly down the hallway, its spotlight whirling madly across the walls. Only when lack of breath stabbed her side and bent them over with wheezing panting did she realize how silly the chase was; a wobbly wave of her hand conjured another crystallization of creatia in the joins of the construct’s eight spidery legs; it seized up immediately, almost falling over from momentum.

     Gathering her breath, the Altmer drew closer to it and made out its model more clearly. It was something quite unlike anything she had seen before: a short, hollow cylindrical framework supported by a spider chassis and carrying on its back what looked like a _lectern_ , of all things. The journal it held in front of itself, turning the pages frantically with its fine mandibles. Rapid bursts of light and acrid black smoke crackled inside its skeleton. She watched in fascination as it flipped through every single page in this manner and then, without deliberation, closed the journal and laid it gently on the stone floor.

     In all her years, she had never seen a construct like _this_ before. Another artifact of the low alert level, perhaps? Most unarmed constructs were probably pulled into storage when the structure went on the defensive – maybe even melted down and repurposed.

     The Altmer stepped forward; the alarmed construct whirred and spun frantically, kept immobile by her spell. The lectern emerging from the top of its cylindrical body was formed from a flat pane of clouded glass in a metal frame, illuminated from below by a beam of light projected from within the automaton. The light formed three Dwemeris words upon the glass, flickering and sparkling intermittently: _Inexplicable_ , _Paradoxical_ , and _Miraculous_. Hesitantly, she laid one long finger on the word _Miraculous._ Instantly the display changed; a list of terms filled the lectern, subcategories ranging from _Dwemer_ to _Stout_. Could it be… some kind of automated encyclopedia? Her heart pounded; her ears rang a little. Such a thing would be priceless beyond compare.

     Bending down swiftly, she examined the automaton’s inner workings. It seemed as though the light projected the words through a scrolling roll of some kind of… cloth? Metal? Parchment? As she dragged her finger down beside the list, the roll of material, like a miniature scroll, unrolled in response, changing the display. The framework of the construct’s body was filled with rack upon rack of the things. Fascinating; if the Altmer was right, those contained miniaturized renditions of Dwemeri texts. She straightened up, beyond excited. What would she look up first? The entirety of Dwemer knowledge before them, every topic imaginable literally at her fingertips!

     But of course there was only one place to start. The Altmer had read countless schematics and explanations of Dwemeri theories and designs – but to read what the Dwemer had thought of _themselves_ … now that would be truly remarkable. She selected _Dwemer_. The construct whirred, its internal arms switching out the tiny scroll for another, and a new list of terms appeared; translating slowly, she read _culture_ , _history_ , _genealogy, recipes_ … but one term in particular caught her eye. Written in by hand, it seemed – somehow – and blazoned at the head of the list was what seemed to be the word _Epithalamium._ She knew no such word, she had no idea what it meant, and yet… she selected it. A whirr and a click later, an image of a hand-written page appeared on the glass, black ink on wrinkled parchment, an actual, _personal_ Dwemeri journal. The first word: _Abstract._

But just then, an ominous garble of nasal cries echoed from further down the dark hallway, and dark, hunched shapes skulked forward, bearing the flickering glimmers of magicka to loom their shadows along the walls. The Altmer knew those cries well; she had heard them many times since coming to Skyrim to study the Dwemer ruins there. The Falmer: the vicious, merciless remains of the mer who had once ruled the land, reduced to troglodytes picking over the bones of Dwemer marvels. But terribly dangerous, for all that. The Altmer reached out to her Dremora servants, summoning them from their posts around the camp to guard the doors, and then snatched up encyclopedia construct bodily and turned tail toward the camp. Behind her flailing knobby knees and jerking elbows, the Falmer cries grumbled ever louder, lurking in the shadows.

     “F-Falmer!” she shouted as she slammed the doors closed behind them and sealed them with a hasty spell. “Back down this hall!” She gasped breathlessly and stumbled toward the fire where the Nords stared grimly out into the groaning dark.

     “Not just that hall, elf,” Hulgar growled, pointing around. “They’ve broken through your witchcraft at _every_ door.” And indeed, her spells had somehow been sundered; huddled shapes growled angrily from the shadowed doorways.

     “There must be an entire hive of them out there,” said Bromgartr. “Where did they come from? We saw none of the signs.”

     “The Falmer have twisted magicks to keep themselves hidden, man. And they live in holes in the walls you never notice until they jump out at you,” answered Hulgar. “I’ve been a miner my entire life… you never know when those horrors will ambush you, believe me.”

     “There are too many for your demons,” spat one of the copper-bearded man’s nephews. “We have to get out of here; no four men could defeat an entire hive alone, and none will sing a tale of our attempt if we all die.” He began hurriedly stuffing his bag, tossing flaming brands from the fire into the room to ward off the Falmer as long as possible; blind as they were, the little sight they had left was extremely sensitive to bright lights.

     “I’m sorry about your research, friend,” Hulgar said quietly, clapping the Altmer’s arm. “But all the research and all the gold in the world isn’t worth losing our lives, is it?”

     She shook her head and clutched the automaton to her chest. “It doesn’t matter, really, it doesn’t matter! What I have here is more than I ever could have hoped. Leave everything but the bedrolls and the food; I can replace my books later.” The hallways roiled with dark shapes, boiled with war cries. “Let us go!”

 

* * *

 

     Admia grinned from her perch on the tympanum’s overhang as she listened to the Atmorani frantically fleeing, making even more noise than usual in an attempt to wound fragile Falmer ears – their own, clearly, were insensitive as stone; they had not even heard her sing the tones to shatter the seals upon the doors. An old Atmorani trick, their yells, like the ward of flame. That would have kept many of her kin away, but her eyes were strong from long exposure to the metal sun of Summersgap, and no mere fire could scare her. She knew all the Atmorani tricks, passed down on their atonal tongues aunt to nephew, uncle to niece the past millenia, their cunning, evil little ways to keep Falmer down in the hole. Indeed, she knew them better than any still living.

     Of course there were not actually any other Falmer in her Gap; there were only great confused clusters of canned caculas playing back the songs she had imprinted onto their records. Much like what she did in the attunement shell, but simpler, just a basic recording. Emeratis had had a construct like that, though he had had to piece it together from salvaged parts and half-shredded schematics. He loved to record his thoughts and theories with the thing, listen to them later to recall the details, save a song to greet her when she came back to the nest…

     With a start, she realized the sounds of the Atmorani had receded completely; only her own cloned cries disturbed the overtone archways. She lowered herself down from the wall swiftly and checked the ports in the walls and floor – yes, the rest of the devil worshipper’s spells had gone. Agitated tuners were popping up all across the chamber, clacking their pincers angrily and banging their forks on the floor to ring defensive ward-waves. She made her way past the flaming brands to the remains of the Atmorani camp. Sizzling fat, roasted meat, a smoldering page touched by flame… she fumbled around and found the abandoned – lamb leg? And took a great bite. Overcooked, but delicious nonetheless. Her hand touched a bottle as she searched; after sniffing it she eagerly tossed back, savoring the mix of salty flesh and fermented sweetness. It was always a treat to find Atmorani with some of _that_ , whatever it was.

     There was nothing else of interest to her left; they had taken their blankets and furs, and the tent was far too coarse to be suitable for a nest. A few books, but Atmorani script was too primitively small and dark for her to read without a crystal even if she had known their degenerate tongue.

     She followed the fleeing looters back up through the ruined labyrinth belatedly, leaving behind the cacula to mill aimlessly, blaring her voice and filling the tympanum with effervescent fog. As soon as she heard their voices receding up the access delve she abandoned the pursuit. No doubt they would return, and in greater numbers, but she had won enough time to establish herself and prepare.

     Over the next week, Admia transferred her things from the lonely work room in the upper cultivation cave to a cozy sleeping chamber with a warm perfect fourth and a depression in the center for building a nest. Par assisted her, with great joy to be back at her side; they rubbed her face all over with their mandibles when she got back, and clicked excitedly for almost an hour. Guide chaurus were not accustomed to being separate from their people for so long. The eggs – nearly ready to hatch – she wrapped carefully in silk and transferred to one of the overflowing mushroom silos. That should give them enough food that they wouldn’t get territorial or hungry enough to eat each other.

     And for a time, yes, there was again too much to do; the hatchlings to tend and train, tediously repeating action and reward and cordoning off those that would serve primarily as guards and guides and those to serve as labor and eventually material, their diets tailored to shape their bodies as she had learned from her grandbass long ago. There was the Gap to memorize in full, arranging its chords according to the formulaic music matrix of tradition; the only composition she knew, but she did it well. There were the walls to splash with huge interlinked circles and words painted in the juice of phosphorescent footlamp fungi, that glowed when she sang its twin-tone tune and comforted her with figures from fantasy and family. There were the cats to hunt in the bitter burn of the Endless Gap, tracking by Par’s guiding clicks through the bewildering wind and unwalled ways until they found three stalking cats amongst the rocks, gorging on a fallen troll. An edgy battle in the open like that, against cats so tending to quiet, but together they clipped their tendons and speared their throats, and dragged the helpless bodies to bleed out over the cliff where the blood would not stain their coats. Then there were was the butchering, the fat to render, meat to smoke, furs to clean and cure, teeth to whittle for whistles special to her chaurus usher.

     But then, when it was all done and she lay in her nest of silk and furs, the harmony of the room ringing around her to the rhythm of the wheels in the walls… what did she really have? An usher to care and tend… but never sell or share. A fortune of food, more than she could ever eat alone. An entire gap to herself, just waiting for Atmorani to return and take it from her. She almost missed them, then, missed having an enemy to give her focus. It had helped. What did she have without that? A beautiful bed to die in. She was already dead. _Dead_ in the ears of all her kin, and the admittance of that sleep was pointless to avoid.

     She roamed the singing halls, watching the animunculi at their work, tireless, tireless. The Deep Folk had always been so inexhaustible, so incredibly powerful, choosing even their own end. Had they heard a tone above even what she had learned? Did their animunculi? Who could do so much for so little and feel no exhaustion?

     The well drew her. It had drawn her every day since she drove away the Atmorani, though she had tried to ignore its empty pull at her ears, had avoided the refectory and taken water from the irrigation lines in the cultivation caverns. But the current tugged at her heart, and what would it matter, anyway? That silence was nothing she did not already know. She stepped inside, deaf in the black of its thirst. So thirsty, for the source of water. A well, but why should a well spell such a thing as this, this tugging emptiness, this invitation to drown in pure listening. This was not a thing of the Deep Folk, this was not what should be. She had bathed in silence so many times. It scared them, they didn’t understand how she could yearn for that and yet return to them, renewed. Not even Emeratis had understood.

     It drove them away, ultimately; ultimately, it killed her. The silence of sleep, the small death, the renewing rest. They’d never understood; they had sentenced her to death unending, _eternal_ slumber. That had never been what she wanted, never what she needed, what the _world_ needed. She slumped against the stone, ears ringing the wail of separation that always came in the acclimation of silence. She could not do this, but _this_ was what her life truly was. Death, silence, slumber forever, irreparably sundered from kin and could-be. This well of black water, depth unknown, abyss unending, _this_ was her condemnation and only hope. The void filled her ears; she could see nothing, hear nothing, feel only the cold metal dissociating from her fingers.

     Admia’s first suicide had been born of desperate hope, and the silence had woken of itself to save her. This suicide was born only of despair, and the silence accepted her without stirring.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Four**

* * *

  _Orcs are thankfully easy to recognize from other humanoids by their size -- commonly forty pertans in height and fifteen thousand angaids in weight -- their brutal pig-like features, and their stench. They are consistently belligerent, morally grotesque, intellectually moronic, and unclean. By all rights, the civilized races of Tamriel should have been able to purge the land of their blight eras ago, but their ferocity, animal cunning, and curious tribal loyalty have made them inevitable as leeches in a stagnant pool._

-   Tyston Bane, _The Pig Children_  

* * *

     She knocked three times, jolting the sturdy timber door in its jamb, and Ishme jerked reflexively to her feet. Fifteen years, three months, twenty-seven days… and, still, the old routine reflex. Her husband looked at her inquiringly, lying at ease in front of the fire but drawing a smudged blister charm on the air just in case. These were uneasy times, even in the back valleys of Eastmarch; little good was likely to come knocking in the night.

     But Ishme shook her head. “Don’t bother,” she said, sighing as she crossed the room. “I know who it is.” She unbolted the door and pulled it open wearily. The night framed a squat figure, traveling cloak dripping with the slow summer drizzle. Ishme bowed, and cold, callused hands cupped her face; wet lips pressed a kiss to her forehead. Fifteen years, three months, twenty-seven days…

     “Good evening, girl,” said her mother. “I will take tea and a side of beef.” Then she stepped inside and began peeling away her oiled cloak. Ishme took it to hang on an antler by the door, still in shock.

     “Lagat gra-Ushar then, must be?” said her husband as he pushed himself up from the floor. “I am Negmeg, marriage-mother. Be welcome to our hearth.” He pressed his forehead to the Orc’s, mingling breath in the Nord manner of greeting. He looked much like a piece of straw stuck to a boulder, his wiry arms and skinny little neck next to Lagat’s stone-steady stance and bluff brow, her thick white tusks.

     “Thank you,” replied Lagat, patting his arm absently as she looked around at the masterful stonework, the polished logwork, the intricate rug-weave on the walls. “It is a far more friendly hearth than I expected – this is not the life of your brothers in soot.” Still, she casually wiped a smudge of charcoal off a chairback with her sleeve. Ishme clenched her fists spasmodically. Her husband was a Jhunal man, a collier; if she tried to keep the house completely free of smudges she would wear herself through in a single year.

     Their house was not really dirty, anyway. The smooth slate floor, puzzled cleverly together by skilled hands, was swept and scrubbed, if a bit scuffed. There were no cobwebs in the rafters of the Jhunal-frame roof, steeply sloped and pointed to slough off the snow, and if there was a little dust in the corners… well, she would have Adanji sweep her tail through a few times. They kept the Khajiit girl to watch the goats and help run the mill, apprenticed at her parents’ request, but she did more napping than work, most days. She watched Ishme’s mother intently, draped along one of the rafters above the hearth.

     “Please, mother, sit down by the fire,” Ishme said, vainly attempting to usher her toward one of the huge, cushioned armchairs. “I will go down to the cellar and start the beef.”

     “No need, Ishme, I’ll do it,” said Negmeg, and pattered down the stone stairs at the end of the single room. Lagat likewise foiled her plans, pushing Ishme’s arm firmly aside and stomping up to one of the several large, slanted desks built in place around the room and covered variously with bits of leather, paper, and charcoal. She seemed to shed animals as she went; a bunny flopped out of the loose top of her leather boot, a cat poked its tattered ears out of the tall neck of her plain green robes, and a black squirrel leaped from her bosom to scale the walls and chitter at Adanji in the rafters.

     “I’ll just put water on the fire for tea, then,” Ishme mumbled, but her mother was clearly not even trying to listen; she was examining Ishme’s designs for the new mill from a quarter-inch’s distance, the end of her nose leaving a faint line of smudged charcoal along the page. The sums she toiled through painfully, brow furrowed, but made no comment. No surprise there; Lagat could read, but hard as she had struggled she had never become _fast_ about it. The diagrams, though, she took one look at and let out a loud “Phaw!” and snatched up the charcoal.

     “We don’t have beef,” Negmeg said, returning from the cellar, “but there is plenty of smoked goat, if that will serve?”

     “Eh?” barked Lagat, cocking her head and cupping a hand around her pointed ear but not looking up from her furious additions to the design.

     “Smoked goat, mother!” Ishme shouted in answer.

     “That will do, charcoal man,” Lagat said, nodding. “And it will save time besides. Good work. Could you please arrange it by the fire, there? I am a bit chilled. Ishme, your husband will need a hand with the table. Oh, and kitten,” she interrupted the hiss-chitter war in the rafters with a single calm glance, “please go replace the goats’ hay. I noticed their shelter’s roof had blown free and secured it on my way in, but their bedding will go bad if left wet for long. Best not tarry.” She set down the charcoal, having finished her sketch of a completely new mill design right overtop Ishme’s, and stomped over to lay a new log on the faltering fire.

     Adanji blinked down at Ishme, but the Orc just shook her head, eyebrows arched fixedly, and caught the other end of the table with Negmeg. After a moment, the Khajiit bounded down from the rafters, wrapped herself in her cloak, and fled into the dripping night.

     When everything was laid out properly – sharpest knives, the goat cut and provisioned with honey and frostberry jam for dipping, the largest of their clay cups steaming with mother’s tea – Ishme lowered herself to the edge of a chair as her mother began her feast across the table.

     “It’s good to see you again, mother,” she said. Fifteen years, three months, twenty-seven days… “How has your retirement been?”

     “I am Archmage of the Clever College at Winterhold,” answered Lagat, and took a long slurp of tea.

     Ishme barely managed not to goggle. Magic? _Mother?_ “That’s wonderful! Congratulations to you!”

     Lagat shrugged. “It is work. Wizards take a good deal of ordering.” She took a noisy bite of goat. “And you? Again, your charcoal man is clearly doing better for himself than most – I’ve seen where they live, the College goes through forests of paper – but what about you? I see you’re keeping up with your sums –“ she gestured at the paper littering the desks, covered with Ishme’s neat equations, “but have you _done_ anything with them?”

     Done anything with them? Ishme was a mathematician trained in the Twelfth Circuit School of Julianos in the Imperial City, employed in off-site capacity by the College of Whispers. They paid _her_ to fix _their_ spells and to write their proofs and theorems. She was one of Tamriel’s premier authorities on numerical mythopoeia and divine gematria.

     “I was working on a new design for our paper mill,” she said. “The house and the new mill were both gifts, but unfortunately the mill is a little inefficient. If I-“

     “I saw it, yes,” said Lagat. “It would work, but really there’s a cleaner way to do things. You see –“

     “I… think I can work it out from your drawing, mother,” interrupted Ishme, looking askance at the squat little woman. When had she learned mechanics, either? Was that typical Winterhold coursework?

     They sat in silence for several long minutes. Lagat finished her goat unconcernedly and sat back, wiping her fingers meticulously clean. The fire crackled and popped as the logs settled.

     “Why have you come, mother?” sighed Ishme at last.

     “Because I need your help, Ishme.”

     The two held grave gazes a long moment.

     “With what?”

     “With the empowerment of our kin. I’ve found something that could allow us to establish an Orc nation unassailable. But it needs to be readjusted, and I do not have the maths I need to tune the design. I need your sums.”

     “Gods – an Orc nation already exists! It’s called Orsinium, by Oblivion, and it’s been around for thousands of years! When will you finally give up this empire-mongering nonsense?”

     Lagat’s eyes followed Ishme’s lips, mouthing the words back to herself. When she caught up, she frowned blackly.

     “Don’t you dare give me that Orsinium talk again, girl!” she snapped. “Orsinium is a ghost! Orsinium is nothing but an ashen memory! Thousands of years? Thousands of years of sack and scourge and agonizing resurrection, then sack and scourge again! Do not talk to me of _Orsinium!_ ”

     “You think calling it something different can change anything? I’ve told you again and again, we’re a cursed people, mother! The sums don’t lie! How many people like us have started _anything_ that lasted, really lasted? Nothing we do lasts; that’s just how it is for us, and the world doesn’t _care_ how it _should_ be. You think whatever pithy piece of thaumaturgy you’ve found can change that? Phaw! You couldn’t change it before and you can’t change it now, and I won’t let you burn up my life in trying.”

     A pause as Lagat caught up with the rushing tirade; she mimed the words back to herself, lips twitching in lag. Then, without explanation, she removed a piece of paper from a packet inside her sleeve, unfolded it, and slid it across the table.

     Ishme stared. The page was covered in formulae, a proof… but in Lagat’s overlarge writing, but more sharply cut and squared than the last time Ishme had graded her copybooks. Fifteen years…

     “This seems to describe, generally, the rules of intersections amongst strange attractors,” she said quietly. Negmeg’s bleached eyebrows bounced. “To my knowledge… this is not a result that has been shown before.” Indeed it had not, and the implications iterated around her in phantom equations.

     “If this had anything to do with what I want, or what you want, daughter, I would not have come here,” Lagat said, leaning forward intensely. “I know you don’t want to see me. But this is a matter of duty, of what we owe to the future, to our children and grandchildren. You work for the good of your family, you work for the good of your children, you work for the good of all Orsimer. You try to make the world a better place for people like us. That is my duty and that is your duty, however much you _want_ it to be different. _That_ is the way the world is, and it cares nothing about what _should_ be.”

     “Where did you get this.” Full stop, no inflection.

     “In an archive of countless other such things I can’t read in from out. Those who left that archive behind also left something that _can_ change our place in the world. But I need your help, daughter. I need your sums.”

     Ishme ground her teeth, clacked her tusks. Mother had never understood that the only way to help their kind was to better things for _everyone,_ not just Orcs. Or that her quiet life doing maths in the woods could contribute to that in any real way. But if there were more results like this one to find… there would be, of course; Lagat had never lied to her.

     “I need your help, Ishme,” she said, “and I know it will not be easy. But I promise you that you can do this. You can do so much. I have known that since I first saw charcoal in your hands. We can _make_ something, Ishme. We can change the world.”

     Ishme sighed, and laid her head on the table in her arms. “Fine,” she mumbled. “I’ll help you.”

     “Eh?” Lagat replied, turning her ear toward the table.

     Her daughter threw up her hands. “I said fine! I’ll go with you.”

     “Good.” Lagat stood, and pressed a kiss to Ishme’s forehead. Fifteen years… “I’m proud of you, Ishme. We leave first thing in the morning. Collier, pack a week’s rations for us, please, and leave what instructions you must with your kitten. I will pack Ishme’s kit.” She marched toward the chest of drawers tucked in the corner by the bed, confident Ishme’s clothes would be organized exactly as she had always demanded. Malacath curse her, but they were.

     Ishme sighed as she pushed herself to her feet. “I’ll talk to Adanji, Negmeg,” she said, patting her husband’s streaked cheek. “I have to go get Lopital’s tack and feed ready, and fetch the bridle bags for my notes.”

     “Surely that can wait until the morning?” her smudged husband answered quietly, glancing at Lagat as she plucked through her daughter’s clothes. Ishme laughed, and squeezed his hand.

     “She said first thing, dear. That means we’ll be eating our breakfast on the road.”

     She left him standing there, twiddling a piece of charcoal and chuckling to himself apprehensively.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Five**

* * *

_Alduin is a real dragon, with flesh and teeth and a mean streak longer than the White River. And there was a time when Alduin tried to rool over all of Skyrim with his other dragons. In the end, it took sum mitey strong heroes to finally kill Alduin and be dun with his hole sorry story._

-   Thromgar Iron-Head, _Alduin is Real, and he ent Akatosh_

* * *

     Brital Stone-Stander sat up, and spit the taste of earth from her tongue. She had dreamed of flight.

     Dawn sliced through the room from the single slit in the eastern wall, cutting glitter from the gneiss slab where her head had just rested. The shaft extended straight smooth through the mountainside, cut by her own voice and precisely aligned to accept the breaking of dawn. A cave room, really, however planed its walls, and far bigger than she needed for shelter. Her sleeping slab stood alone at the center, solely illuminated. Beneath rested a rough octagon of mylonite, engraved with her ruminations on the nature of animal heat, radiating an appropriately opiatic warmth.

     She dressed, wrapping herself in the scaled mantles and furs scattered around the room where she had tossed them the night before. Gold and jewels sprinkled carelessly from the folds of her clothes to join the rest of the treasure littering the dusty floor – spillage of the crates, caskets, and chests stacked high in the corners.

Stamping her feet in her boots, Brital strode toward the door, pausing only to survey the charcoal schematic pulled taut in a wooden frame against the wall, dimly visible in the corona of the lone sunbeam. The fixative had taken well overnight, leaving the parchment a light amber from the wash of pine tar. There were lighter fixatives in the south, carried north, sometimes, by Khajiit caravans, but pine tar was what she knew. She ran a rough finger across the page. With hope, she would not have to use it.

Shrieking winds scraped at her cheeks as she threw open the stone door, smooth on hinges oiled in troll fat, winds so fierce and loud that no speech without Voice was possible there, where Kyne’s breath harried the snow in swirls across the stone. Morning’s light blazed from the ice, stinging her eyes; bitter cold bit her ears, but both were nothing.

Brital stood with sun rising at her back and watched the shadow of the Throat of the World shorten across the forests of her childhood, the mists burn off the shores of Lake Ilinalta. Far more often she had looked the other way, from amidst the moss-bearded trees of the Kreath to the mount of the seven thousand steps. Dreaming, first, of High Hrothgar’s calm, but in short span glaring at yet another bitter disappointment. She hungered, but she would not eat; some things were best done in fast. The sun was enough risen, taking its ease on the peak. She spoke.

_You will come._

Her draconic words, quiet as they were, slashed through Kyne’s howls and swept down across Skyrim in a great roaring rush, rippling last year’s dead grasses in the plains.

They were summoned; now, to preparations. She turned from the edge and strode toward the center of the holy mountain’s peak, where stood a circle of thick stones, standing high as her chest and cut from the very rock where Brital now kept her rest. Engraved channels and incised dragon scratch scored their faces, cut by the chisel at Brital’s belt. Just beyond, an enormous inverted triangle faced the dawn, a narrow jamb for the temporal tear it framed – the time wound, where Alduin, dragon of the End Times, had been cast out of the world in days of old.

Brital hauled four crates from her chamber to the circle of stones and wrenched them open, pulling seven thick black books from the padding hay within. She placed one atop each pedestal, closed until needed – and then caught sight of the gaggle of bearded men standing silently in the snow behind her.

“I ent never asked for yenne,” she said – in Tamrielic, but even so the air warped and twisted with her voice. “Get ye back to yer nunnery.”

They traded looks. “You did not tell us of your return, Dovahkiin,” said whatever-his-name-was at the front; he spoke so rarely and said so little, and Brital always forgot names anyway. “We have Need to Speak with you. We allowed you your freedom after the fall of the World-Eater, but now we must consider your place in the world. The crisis is passed, and so passed must be your divine providence.”

Brital snorted, sending a boulder tumbling down the mountain. “Ye couldnat calm me if ye wer ten-thuhhousand times as gree. Deynat talk shit.” She brushed the straw from a final tome, its cover a crazed patchwork of variegated leather.

“We would not dream of trying,” he snarked back, his little voice scratching under her mantle. “Still, you must curb your Voice. The world requires your peace, now.”

“The world think well to want mountainne of me, doesnee? And chanchin’ what it want all over. Myn voice, myn silence, myn anger, myn peace. The world think well to outright _own_ me, eh?”

“You are Dovahkiin. Bormahu’s gift comes with its price: that you use it properly, for the good of others.”

She laughed bitterly. “Deynat fool yerself. The world, she think she own _all_ y’all, mason or master chust the same.” She tucked the last book against her chest and took her place at the center of the circle, before the towering triangular gate. In the distance, faint roars rang between the mountains.

The greybeards again traded inscrutable looks, their hands flashing with their silence signals. The talentless old fools; puny as their voices were, they could not even control their thu’um sufficiently to prevent collateral damage. And too stupid to see that there was _no_ speech without innocent injury.

“It may be that you still have some fate to fulfill,” admitted the hairiest of them. “But we have listened closely to your travels, and you speak without forethought or finesse. Consider the Need behind your actions, Dovahkiin. Consider carefully.”

“Consider myn ass, windy.”

This, of course, they ignored, even with the noisome echoes it wrought. Brital had spent little enough time enduring their teaching, the ill-grammared louts, but enough for inurement.

“How came this here, Dovahkiin?” they asked, gesturing to the pedestal stones and gate. “And what is its purpose?”

“It here because I put it here with myn own handde. What it do yer gonna see when yer masterre come, if ye think ye can survive it.”

“Kyne help us,” spoke one of the silent beards, staring up at the triangular frame. “Elder scrolls.”

Elder scrolls there were indeed, mounted two in the top corners and a third unfurled upon the doorway like a slain swan. Its surface was completely blank, wiped clean by the numinous touch of the very tear in time it had cut so long ago, shimmering there between the stones.

“And these books – they are of Daedric origin,” another said, staring at the tomes on their stones. “Gods – we were troubled by what we heard of you on the winds, but we had not thought your fraternizations had gone so deep! What could such things do, together, here where the blood of Time pools upon the very breeze?”

“That yer gonna see, if ye talk much longer,” Brital grimaced. “But if ye stay ye better know that I’m gonna suck yer breath out yer lungge like all the rest and no hoot or hanny fer what that do to yenne.”

Hot on the wake of her words, a roar shattered the shrieking winds of the peak. An enormous body swept across the sun, the deep rush of its wings whirling about them. Answering roars wailed from far off, their wind-winding owners swift on their way.

“Decide or get out,” Brital snapped, looking to the skies. “Yer masterre are here, and I ent got time for yenne.” And the dragons seized the mountaintop.

They came from every direction, of all sizes and colors and curls of crown, vary-winged but uniformly earsplitting, shouting greetings and insults and coarse banter at each other in dragon tongue as they landed upon boulders and circled the peak, filling the air with flame and brimstone, chill and tingle. Chief among the throng was of course Paarthurnax, millennial-leader of the greybeards themselves upon the Throat. He slammed down atop the stone gate before her, all tattered grey scales and tumorous horns.

“ _Hello, dragonborn,”_ he said through the din, in dragon-tongue. “ _Why have you called us back to the Throat?”_

“ _HELLO!_ ” Brital shouted back.

“ _HELLO!”_ returned the assembled wyrms, knocking the greybeards on their backs in the snow. Brital kept her feet, bound to the earth.

“ _Richness of hunt and hoard to you all!_ ” Brital shouted. “ _I trust you have enjoyed retaking the world without my teeth at your throat or Alduin’s will at your back?”_

An uproar of exclamations, at that, so filled with words as to be unintelligible except in its raw laughter, its glee in plunder and conquest and flight. Paarthurnax, pacifist that he claimed to be, kept quiet, but Brital noted his wings and scales flexing restlessly.

“ _I have not called you here to debate you from the old ways with padded words, as some would,”_ she continued, _“but rather to enlist your assistance with something that concerns all with the blood of Bormahu in their veins.”_ _That_ got only a roundly skeptical reptilian glare.

 _“I of course speak of the wound in time that scars this very mountain,_ ” she said, pointing to the shimmering warp between the stones. _“Mortals ripped the weft of the world when they banished Alduin, using an Elder Scroll to break the very nature of the world. Ultimately, this tear threatens us by our very nature, and is in itself a desecration of the will of Bormahu. We must heal this wound.”_

Scattered rumblings, rippling reality in waves of stardust and sulfur, but the one seemed generally accepting. Of course it did; it was in their blood to desire the proper continuity of time, even if only their mothers actively maintained it. She had not concocted this plan without forethought, after all.

 _“The taste of your words agrees with me,”_ rumbled Paarthurnax, “ _but this wound circumpenetrates all of time. I tried many times to close it myself, but never was I able. Some kenning prevents even the jills from touching it.”_

 _“It was made with an Elder Scroll, an objective account linked inextricably to the history and events of this world,_ ” Brital explained. _“Thus, it must also be_ unmade _with a scroll, and unmade throughout all of time at once.”_ She stared him down, then swept her eyes across the perched wyrms. _“To do this, I will walk upon the winds of time.”_

Another wave of rumblings; barks of disbelief and surprise and apprehension, spinning off into eddying debates of whether such a thing could be possible for a mortal – even a mortal with the blood of Bormahu, the divine dragon of time itself. Several quickly heated into outright arguments, their participants whirling off the mountain to circle each other in mid-air, shouting points and counterpoints in lashes of fire and lightning.

 _“I do not mean insult, friend,”_ spoke Odahviing, cutting through the more measured discussion of those still perched, _“but how will you be able to ride the time winds? Even had you wings, I think you would fall. There is a strange heaviness in you that defies the freedom of flight.”_

 _“Indeed, you are correct,”_ replied Brital, like a scratch under the chin. _“I am unable to fly or be flown._ ” Odahviing _would_ know; she had born Brital across Skyrim several times – or tried to bear her, but had never been able to take her weight farther than a few miles, saying that she had pressed down like a mountain the higher she flew. She could carry all Brital’s crates and chests from Solstheim to the Throat without resting, but Brital herself had had to take a ship.

“ _Then it should be another who enters the winds,_ ” snapped a squirming little wyrm from between another’s spiraling horns. _“Who will enter the maelstrom?”_

“I _will,”_ Brital blasted. _“The prophecy is integral to my own fate, and I am integral to the prophecy. This is not a matter of choice; no other can do this. But as I cannot fly, and none can carry me, I have found a way to_ walk _the winds instead._ ”

 _“The books I have gathered here are the property of the Eye of the Forest,”_ she said, gesturing to the seven-stone circle. _“When last dragonkind ruled this land, they took the form of gems, engraved with secret words at every layer of examination. As I am sure some of you know very well, each represents an egress into the Eye’s Forest, where the detritus of dead possibility is caught and collated. By funneling the Forest’s senesced potential through this Scroll’s grounding irrefutability, I intend to make of this tear a doorway unto a garden of what could have been and may yet still be. On that garden’s paths of certain possibility, I will be free to find and close this tear in all of time.”_

 _“An interesting plan, dragonborn,”_ answered Paarthurnax as the rest growled lowly between; there was too much mortal consideration in this talk for it to make much sense to them. _“The Eye of the Forest may attempt interference, though. It is no sleepy wyrm.”_

 _“The Forest’s Eye has no power here, Paarthurnax,”_ Brital said. _“This is the seat of its antithesis; there will be no interference.”_ She was nowhere near confident of that, in truth, but there would at least be no _prevention_ of her plan.

The ancient dragon showed his throat, ceding the point. _“And what role have we to play in this? Why summon us with your voice of bone?”_

 _“Because the wound must be kept clean and open while I do my work, or I will be unable to heal it here, or return to this time.”_ And because the more thu’um behind the initial unsealing, the more unlikely of possibility’s paths she would be able to tread. “ _Further, I need your breath to guide me back into the world. The paths will by labyrinthine, I expect.”_

But then a puny little voice cut in. _“This many danger,_ ” shouted one of the greybeards. _“Add hide history, demon talk to bone true only must destroy.”_

“Shut yer cretinous mouth,” spat Brital in Tamrielic, spraying him with acidic spittle. “Deynat yenne dare to speak in front yer masterre. Shut yer damned grammalackin’ mouthe.” The others crowded round, whispering words of cleansing to wipe the burning spit from their leader’s skin. Paarthurnax looked on stoically; they had been his pets for many years, but it seemed that time was done.

 _“I do not know how long the repair will require, in this history,”_ Brital went on. _“It may be instantaneous, or it may take months, or even years. I need you to remain here, intoning my guide chant, until I return._ ” She met their eyes one by one. “ _And mind me well. I would have your breath willingly in this,”_ she said, _“but make no mistake: I am the World Eater’s end and I know the words of your wills. I will have your breath in every eventuality.”_

That brought the first true silence since they had arrived. Respect her strength they undoubtedly did, but no one appreciated it.

 _“If that is your truth, then let us begin,_ ” growled Odahviing from her perch. “ _This must be done, but let it be done soon. The world is ripe for the hunting, and those few who resisted your call will take opportunity to seize what we are too busy to claim.”_ The assemblage showed their throats in agreement, and Brital too raised her chin.

 _“Then begin the chant_ ,” she said, and as the rumbling words went up from the scaly congress, meant to synchronize and combine their thu’um, Brital turned to the cowering monks. “Last chance,” she growled. “I told ye – if ye stay I’ll have yer breath chust the same. Yer no dovah; ye may keel down. Good goneance, but fair warnin’ fer foolle.” And without waiting to see what they would choose, she closed her eyes and entered the chant herself.

_Aal mu kos med ven ko gravu'un_

_Aal mu pah aav daar thu'um_

_Aal mu tinvaak voth gein su'um_

The words rushed through Brital’s lungs; she could feel the thu’um of every dragon, each with its own unique resonance. Discrepancies in pitch and rhythm bled gradually away, and they spoke as one through the dragonborn in her circle of stones.

_Aal mu kos med ven ko gravu'un_

_Aal mu pah aav daar thu'um_

_Aal mu tinvaak voth gein su'um_

She opened her eyes and removed a stick of charcoal from the case at her belt. The dragons’ heads were upturned uniformly, their eyes closed, speech in their entirety. She spoke a new word and they spoke with her; the black books slammed open on their pedestals. Brital strode to each and scrawled new words of power upon their pages, and then right out into the very air, linking each tome to the others with chains of text, until the circle whirled with a ring of forbidden lore, a floating shell of etched esotera and smudged sigils. Jhunal sorcery, that, and almost blasphemous there are Kyne’s temple, but Brital gave no damns about that; she would do what she had to do. The sky darkened with the blood of apocryphal possibility, clouds twisting into yellow-grey spirals strafed with multicolored lightning; a reflection of Nirn’s contaminated potentiality. Rifts began to crackle across the air as she continued her work, closing almost instantly, open only long enough to glimpse the Daedric denizens of the myriad realms beyond.

_Aal mu kos med ven ko gravu'un_

_Aal mu pah aav daar thu'um_

_Aal mu tinvaak voth gein su'um_

When all was prepared, she returned to the steps before the time wound in its stone gate, Paarthurnax crouched above. She let the chant build within her, growing in intensity, and then bellowed a new Word.

_Aal mu kos med ven ko gravu'un_

_Aal mu pah aav daar thu'um_

_Aal mu tinvaak voth gein su'um BEX_

The space within the gate tore like rotted cloth, and winds a thousands times more vicious than Kyne’s shrieks tore at Brital’s skin and hair,  pouring through from a chaotic black maelstrom of warped visions and a cacophonous multiplex of language. The sky cracked with the force, spitting flailing hordes of daedra out upon the lands around the mountain. Wails of birth, screams of death, shrieks of laughter and pain, quiet mumbles and soft words, the cries of birds and the eroding lap of the sea on the shore, roaring beasts and chittering insects all at once, flaying and decaying hearing and sight. The Elder Scroll shivered at its egress, blank with the overflow.

Brital wrote once more, scripting a connective paragraph upon the air between the cloud of apocrypha and the pristine scroll. Her charcoal dripped forbidden knowledge, touched the page – and instantly words spilled across the scroll, shifting like oil on water. Another Word, and the edge of the divine parchment spun out into the storm, forking and splitting a thousand thousand times, cutting the clouds of history into woody pillars, twined between with paths for the tread of brave mortals.

Paarthurnax opened his eyes and looked down at her as she stepped toward the doorway of time. He blinked slowly; _yes, go now, do this thing. You do what is good for the world. Heal time. Make it right again._

But when Brital set out upon the black pathways of possibility, charcoal in her hand and the Oghma Infinium tucked against her chest, she had, of course, no intention whatsoever of healing time’s tear.

The dragons chanted on, and the storm raged about the Throat, brooding black fate.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Six**

* * *

_I write to the Unknown. It is you, Unknown, who will execute my experiment. I shall follow the pneumatect into the unconsciousness of absence. I shall allow the streams of my cognizance to short on the nipping twist of nonexistence, but the bones of my identity lie at Vogram's gates, puzzle-bound and inert and hypnopompic. The Unknown shall observe them, and if the presence of absence is fundamentally necessary I shall be renewed in consciousness. If it is not, my dissatisfaction will remain unconscious._

-   _The Epithalamium of Arimatha_

* * *

The water woke her. The abyssal silence of the well dissolved as soon as its water swam into her ears, fondly frothing a summer sultry warmth, cradling her in currents of care; an aquatic orchestral lullaby filled with mottled symphonic crooning. Though soothing, it was not soporific; rather it aroused her somehow. Convection currents of choral character rose and fell within it, calling out, swirling in polyphonic accompaniment and then laying down again to their rests.

Admia opened her eyes. She floated in a bath of gold, the foaming water suffused with a gentle glow. A harmless glow, somehow, though bright. Out of reflex she cupped her hands tightly and began pulling smooth strokes against the currents, but she could see nothing but the fuzzy sunny light, no exit to aim for, and anyway her swimming was not so good. But the symphony attuned to her, and its waves bore her up from the depths of her hopeless plunge – up to the silence. She gasped for breath but could hear it only as distorted percussion in the water’s song, when the waves splashed back over her ears. The cistern hovered blackly above its phosphorescent reservoir.

Her arm bumped into something hard; the waves had carried her to a stone wall. Fumbling across the slippery joins, her fingers found the bars of a ladder, and she climbed out onto the walkway, keeping prosthetic tarsi well away from the rungs; climbing a dry cliff face was one thing, a ladder quite another.

Still the silence; she couldn’t hear anything about the chamber and could only dimply make out the edges of the walkway by their contrast with the water. Her crutches were lost in the refectory above and, without their added stability, her tarsi were death when wet. So she picked a direction and crawled along the middle of the walkway, hoping it would lead her to the cistern’s exit, out of the silence.

A few minutes later, and she bumped into something ahead, hard. She sat back to rub the spot through her wet hair. Staring around, trying to pick up any clue she could, she realized that the darkness of the walkway had widened as she went – she must be at an exit platform, and had knocked her head on the door gong. Pushing against it gave no response, though, so she felt around the edges, looking for a release mechanism. Instead, her fingers found corners and long metal sides; this was some kind of cube, not a door. Not an exit, then? The central platform, if not, where the main water lines usually pumped. Strange to be there without sound; cisterns were usually very beautiful. Above water, not below.

Admia could not recall ever having encountered anything like the metal square blocking the platform’s other walkway, though, in all of the several cisterns she had visited. It was nothing as strange as the silence, and the water, but still… the Deep Folk had been a regular people, when it came to basic functions; cisterns were usually identical in design, except where changes were dictated by use of natural caverns or the like.

But she had no care to ponder over that curiousity just then; her wet hair had turned cold in the air, dripping chilly down her back, and the silence stole her strength moment by moment. She crawled back the way she came, following the walkway to another platform and the cistern’s real exit. The door-gongs rang comfort as she pushed them closed with her shoulders, and the ordinary rumble and keen of the chord-corridors rose up around her.

One hand on the wall, Admia trod slowly along on her drying tarsi, exploring. It seemed she has missed an entire wing in her initial memorization, for those passages fit nowhere in her cartographical composition for the hold. Maintenance access shafts and systems housing it seemed, for the most part, though there were a few limited mining delves, hopping with curious prospecting constructs and snoring excavators. A single workshop, singing its flow harmony… and no way back into the rest of the gap, by door nor pipe nor vent. But there _must_ be a way back; the Deep Folk did not just arbitrarily seal away key sections of their holds. Sometimes hidden doors, though, and those could be tricky. She had looked for simple levers and cranks, and even tapped at walls for hidden panels, but found nothing.

The only place she _hadn’t_ looked… was back in the cistern, where that out of place blockade cluttered the platform. In the cistern there were also pipes she could climb, and an open hatch back to the refectory. _If_ she could navigate them deaf.

She was there in a rash minute, walking, this time, across the gap between the phosphorescent waters. She should consider it more carefully, her absent wife whispered to her in the silence, but that was a waste of time; she knew this was the only way. The reservoir frothed around her, a churning amber blur lurking with submerged suns. She hadn’t noticed that, before, but yes, there were concentrations there, swimming spheres of light. The memory of their song wound through her as she reached the blockade.

Metal; straight edged, taller than the reach of her fingertips. Indentations etched the surface, tracing out Deep Folk geometries. Here and there, a protruding rod, like a handle. She could use those to climb over it – she did so without hesitation, and found it covered on top as well. Some kind of box. She should be able to climb down to the walkway on the other side. But as she pushed herself fully atop it, the last rod rotated in her hand, and a sharp clang cracked the air.

Her scalp tingled; her fingers flushed. Her gasp went unheard. The room waited. Slowly, hands inexplicably trembling, she took hold of another rod – and pushed. It rotated too, as though attached to some kind of pivoting panel set in the face of the cube, and another sharp clang jangled through her teeth, another unexplained note. The silence seemed to tighten in response, anxious, and Admia growled war-tones into it uselessly. Didn’t like that, did it? Didn’t want to be broken? Wanted to keep its precious peace but allow her none? She slammed a third rod around, ignoring the pain in her ears. Trap her in nothingness but deny her sleep, would it? Another, and the air wound tight upon itself. She threw every one her fingers could find, filling the room with a clamorous cacophony, then jumped recklessly down and threw those on the sides, too, her heart pounding wild against her ribs, lips numb, pounding sound into the black mercilessly, ferociously, abandoned. The silence swallowed her heavy breath, seeming ready to pant itself; she clanged on. And though she reached at random, clambering willy nilly across the cube, somehow a rhythm emerged from the clatter, and then a melody; a song, and though suddenly Admia was cold with clarity, free of her senseless fury, she could not stop. The song drew her onward, turning the rods across the face of the cube like some instrumentalist animunculi to a secret score. Each motion seemed only natural, given the notes before; logical, progressive, inevitable. They assembled a lonely tune against the twisting soundless backdrop, wistful and minor but imbued with marching resolution against the ever-deepening presence of absence. A fiery rush of ascension, the writhing silence, and then – it cut off without warning. The rod in her hand slid away; a panel of the cube opened inward, and the silence burst of its overwrought emptiness.

Admia almost fell inside; she caught herself on the frame. Her hair dripped again down her back, this time with sweat. Blood trickled from her ears.

She fell to her hands and knees as she stepped inside the cube; more stable that way, less likely to fall over whatever she had unlocked. She crawled forward slowly; even the ringing she knew she should hear after a song like that was stolen by the easy quiet. Her hand touched something soft, warm. It felt like… but it was too smooth for that. She drew her hand along the object, left with touch alone in the dark and deaf.

The unmistakeable texture of hair greeted her fingers, and the cracking of sobs her ears.


	8. Chapter 8

Sorry about the wait on this one. Projects/exams/presentations/research/health issues/travel really slowed writing down the last few weeks.

**Chapter Seven**

 

* * *

_Soon she found herself in a part of the woods she had never been before, and sat down on a rock since she was very tired._

_Well, the rock was a secret entrance to a cave where a very mean orc lived. When he came back from his hunting, he found Mara curled up asleep on his rock, and thought to himself, "Hmmm, a tasty little girl. I shall save her for my breakfast!"_

\-- Zhen, _Mara’s Tear_  

* * *

 

     “Is that it?” asked Ishme, incredulous, and Negmeg chuckled lowly beside her.

     They had just crested the saddle of the pass to Skyrim’s craggy northern shore. A narrow cliff followed the ridge to the west, and the sea spread beneath them, scummy with old ivory foam among the litter of rocky islands. The Clever College of Winterhold reared up from the slush, a bulky castle perched upon a natural pillar of stone whipped smooth by wind and rain – or, perhaps more likely, considering, by arcane forces unknown. Imposing at first glance, a second revealed that it was little more than a pathetic pile of rubble patched precariously together by secondary stonework. The curtain wall clashed like crooked teeth, shattered in multiple places; the towers and halls sat at crazed angles, jutting out over the ocean. Hundreds of bridges and stairways zigzagged between curtain, keep, towers, and outbuildings; they seemed to hold the place together just as much as anything else. A single narrow bridge connected the pile to the cliff, where a small log hall looked out over the tiny village on the scraggly shore below.

     “Is that it?!” Ishme repeated, raising her voice. She had heard that Winterhold had been hard struck by some kind of cataclysm, leaving only the College still standing, but she would have thought the mages to protect themselves more completely than that. Or at least to repair the place afterward.

     “Yes!” Lagat barked back as she trudged on down the road, wasting no time. “That is my College.”

     Ishme traded looks with her husband. He grinned, then tugged at Lopital’s lead and followed her mother down the mountain with the scroll-laden mule in reluctant tow. Ishme sighed, then stepped quickly to keep up.

     “Mother,” she said when she had drawn even with Lagat and bent to put her mouth by Lagat’s pointed ear, “how did you become Archmage exactly?”

     She had asked the same question nearly every day of the two week journey from Eastmarch. And, every time, Lagat had failed to hear her – the wind ate her words entirely, or Lagat misheard and instead launched into an hour’s lecture on the history of earth magic from wyrd sisters to edaphomancers to wilderqueen, or she outright ignored the question – she had never seen much sense in bothering with matters irrelevant to the task at hand, or with telling anyone more than she thought they needed to know.

     But this time she pursed her lips and answered. Perhaps the wind was a _little_ quieter.

     “I started from the bottom and worked my way to the top,” she said, “like anyone with good salt.”

     “As an apprentice?” yelled Negmeg.

     Lagat snorted. “Is that your idea of the bottom, Nordy boy? No – I started in the middens. Department of Architectural Inculcation originally hired me on as a janitor.”

     “And you taught yourself magic by reading in the library after-hours,” Ishme finished, as though she had heard the tale many times, but her mother laughed.

     “No, girl. I ate saltrice and mung beans every day and gave half my wages to one or the other lazy apprentice to read _to_ me. If I could read that well on my own I’d be Empress, not Archmage.” Lopital, the traitor, hiccupped a laugh along with her.

     “One thing led to another as these things do,” she elaborated, “and within a few years I was Head of the Department. Headmistress of Maids; we do a lot more than architectural inculcation, really. Keep the place together. I got to know that Aren boy pretty well as things went on - I don’t think anyone had thought to do his laundry in years – and when the poor thing died mending his sins, well, _someone_ had to take charge. It was a right mess in there, let me tell you. The place nearly crumbled right off the cliff; we had to quadruple the propaganda on the walls for six months afterward.”

     Ishme frowned. “What happened?”

     “You know – wizard nonsense, the fools. Altmer, too, so you know it’s going to be even worse. Psijiics, the useless blaggards. Eye of Magnus trying to shake down my school. Well, I sent them off with it, and good riddance. Let it sink Artaeum; we don’t need _that_ one anyway. Aren and the fool are dead and that Eye isn’t shredding the Daedron streams; that’s what matters. The rest is just blather.” Ishme let it lie at that; no hope of getting her mother to say more when she’d made that declaration.

     They wound down the switch-backed road to the cliff, and then along the lee of the mountains toward the college. Below, tiny fishing boats bobbed in the choppy waters, weaving between huge slabs of stone jutting up from the waves, here and there bearing a lonely house or inn connected to each other by salt-stained rope bridges.

     “I’ve seen drawings of it before the Collapse,” Negmeg said, gesturing out over the ocean. “The city stepped down from here all the way out past the College, in tiers. Old stonework; beautiful masonry in the old Atmoran tradition, but more subtle. There were towers of the clevermen a half mile out, with daedra of umbrage chained below the water to keep the docks thawed in the coldest winter.” He pointed northwest, where the mountains broke off abruptly in abrupt gnash. “Hoarfrost Hall stood there on a rocky spur, looking north to Atmora, west to the tomb of Ysgramor himself.” His eyes trailed down to the tiny village. “And somehow swallowed up completely, not even rubble remaining.”

     Ishme nodded, unmoved. Tattered banners blazoned with a somber grey crown flapped from the timbers of the Jarl’s longhouse by the College’s gates; a stringy little man watched them from the wrapped porch, but gave no greeting. Lagat led them across the cracked spit of a bridge that spanned the gap to the school without even glancing at him. Out in the sharp open air, Ishme heard the longhouse door crack closed – and then had to snatch at a scroll slipping free of Lopital’s travel bags, caught on a crooked cobble. The bridge must have been built after the collapse; the stonework was shoddy, and it was barely wide enough for the mule’s bulging belly, much less their luggage.

     Rusty iron gates cut deep in the crooked, overhanging curtain wall opened at their approach, letting on a wide hall paved in flagstone – smooth, but stained with dark water marks and patches of lichen and moss. Long panes of whitewashed glass steepled the roof, here and there propped open a few inches. Steel pipes lined the long hall above their heads, groaning and twitching intermittently with pressure, and lush leaf-sequences pressed up against the glass walls from other rooms, iterated from open doors.

     “Is this a glasshouse?” Ishme asked.

     “Of course it is,” her mother answered, stomping toward an intersection ahead. “Cleverness isn’t complete if you’re ignorant of the vegetative, and our alchemists are very wasteful in their research.”

     “Is it supposed to do that?” Negmeg asked warily as one of the pipes began shrieking keenly. Lagat only nodded.

     “And is it supposed to be so… overgrown?” added Ishme as she pulled Lopital away from a patch of milk thistle sprung up between the flagstones.

     “No,” Lagat said, scowling. “But some things only the gardener knew how to manage.”

     “What happened to the gardener?”

     Lagat turned right around and stared her daughter down.

     “The gardener is dead.”

     The pronouncement hung in the air for a long moment, until Lagat turned to lead them past the head and shoulders of a large statue of a constipated mage clenching their jaw (and presumably their buttocks), set in the floor of the intersection with another wing of the glasshouse. She did not comment upon the statue, and neither did Lagat nor Negmeg as she lead them out a small side door, but Lopital honked and took a large chomp out of the moss ring-worming their stone rictus.

     The glasshouse quartered a large, barren quad within the jagged walls, it seemed, undercut here and there by dank walkways half-filled with lost notebooks and old gossip settled in scribbles along the margins of the steps.  
     “It’s down we’re going,” Lagat said as she began climbing a rickety iron staircase clinging to the slanted side of one of the buildings, “but to get to the bottom of things, you usually have to get to the top first.”

     Ishme balked. “Mother, Lopital will not be able –“ but as she spoke, the mule pranced right past her up the stairs, honking smugly. Their legs had been replaced with huge Imga arms, for gripping the railing and walls.

     “She’s good,” said Negmeg quietly. “That spell went by so fast I couldn’t even read it.”

     They made their way up the clinging stairs, across a balustrade budging the eaves of two crumbling outbuildings, and through a willow veil of rusty wind chimes hung from the rafters of a roofed walkway along the outer wall. A crazy clatter of eclectic architecture seemed to grow from the beached, broken body of the College’s original keep and corollaries; a fuzz of conidial towers and chimneys of every style in Tamriel, tangled with spiral staircases and rickety walkways over the clouded glasshouse cross. Even a Telvanni cleistothecium reared up among the others of myriad stone and wood, slowly digesting the plank roof of the older building below. Its round door stood ajar, and inky eyes glittered from the darkness within.

     The place seemed almost completely empty. The only signs of life were the surreptitious twitching of curtains as they passed and a team of sharply dressed Cyrod Imga scaling the scaffolding around what looked like a _new_ spire. Positioned at makeshift podiums around the exoskeleton of projected masonry, they tossed off charming grins and ribald rhetoric at the brick assemblage; the vote passed, and another layer of stones flew into place. Behind them, another’s rotting balcony sagged under the weight of a crow’s hoard of iridescent shells.

     “The Department of Architectural Inculcation?” Ishme asked with a frown. “Seems a shaky foundation.”

     “Tell it Shalidor, if you see him,” grunted Lagat. “He founded the place on a whisper.” She pulled open a door in the steeply-slanted side of the main keep and strode inside at an angle, as though there were nothing at all unusual about it. Ishme, Negmeg, and Lopital – the mule’s hands silently reverted to hooves – followed hesitantly, and found that as soon as they stepped inside, it was the rest of the world that seemed off-kilter.

     “There’s certainly enough work to go around here, it seems,” Ishme commented. “Why add _more_ rooms to keep up?”

     Lagat snorted. “Girl, if we thought like that we’d have fallen into the sea a long time ago. Place like this, you’ve got to _add_ content if you want it to survive, not just update the old.”

     “I’d think some of my Brothers in Jhunal would be here for this,” Negmeg said. “They could help – we know a good deal about words.”

     “They already do. We make our mortar from the pulped scrolls of their history of the College, plus a bit of filamentous fungi for hyphal hold. I told you before – I see a lot of your order’s product.” Negmeg blanched.

     The Archmage led them down, then, through dusty classrooms where the pupil ghosts carved ectoplasmic graffiti on the broken desks and stony corridors lit by wax atronachs slumped in caged alcoves. As they went, Lagat gathered an entourage of cats, dogs, bantam guar, and hedgepigs, stopping to greet and treat each one as they ran eagerly out from their crannied lairs. The elves and humans they met got greetings sterner in tone but no less caring.

     “Good day, Ma’lehdey. Have you mastered the second cultural metamorphosis yet? No? Take three hours of recitation and repetition this evening, alternating, and explain the theory to Phedorah before you begin. And tell Aleksos to bake you a plum pie; you look a bit ragged, and your mother can’t have sent on in months, with these roads.”

     “Afternoon, Magister. This is my daughter and her husband. Could you have that treatise on daedron fields finished by Mondas? I know it is challenging, but a first rate scholar like you is more than up to the task. Here, take Butterwhiskers for company, but don’t let her drink from your jagga. She’s too old for cream now, anyway.”

     “Yes, hello Bruxoom. How did your son care for the cake? He did? Excellent; I hope it was big enough. You know, I think you and he would be well suited to scourging the drains in the third column, fifth paragraph of the southeast quarter; they’re causing pooling around Oakflesh’s puppies, and you’re the only ones tall enough for the job.”

     Apprentice and professor alike, they all left with a bit of a glow on their brow and a renewed spring in their step, though whether from pride and enervation or from sweat and fear it was not _quite_ clear. Ishme would bet on both.

     Gradually they wound down out of those corridors used even weekly by the students and teachers and into the maintenance halls, where the walls became slimy and scudded with scum. Frost filled the cracks, and rats and rat skeletons, animated by rogue lesser daedra, scampered away from their feet.

     “Mother?” Ishme said. “Just where are we going?”

     Lagat pulled open a narrow wooden door, and they stepped into a large stone room piled high with stinking mounds of filth. Chutes in the ceiling vomited plumes of trash and kitchen waste into overflowing compost bins along the walls, pushed along the tubing by industrious miniature gargoyles with flat fingers like spades. One corner was stacked to the ceiling with scrolls slowly deflating of their spring in the humid, noisome air. In the center of the room stood the bottom three quarters of the statue they had seen before, and from the tension in its posture it seemed the wizard’s buttocks were clenched as tightly as their teeth.

     “This is the ideological fertilization chamber,” Lagat said. “But this is not our destination. I started here, or roundabouts, at the bottom. I thought this was the lowest you could go in this place, but I was quite incorrect. I didn’t learn my mistake until shortly before I became Archmage. Because it’s like I said – to get to the _very_ bottom,” she said, and behind her the statue was replaced without flare or fanfare by a gnarled fungal trunk, torn by a gaping wound that seemed to wind down like a ramp, “sometimes you have to first get to the very top.”

     


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Eight**

Brought to you in spite of flooding.

* * *

_The Orcs were quite content to wait_

_From Jugular well-watered_

_And fed by fertile fungus fields_

_In Caves of Dark Abundance_

\-- _The Great Siege of Orsinium_

* * *

     Lagat watched their faces closely. She had to be careful. There was so much to tell them, and so little of it reasonably credible. Ishme was only barely with her as it was; the slightest excess pressure would drive her away forever. Her husband was more amenable – useful, though Lagat did not need Negmeg himself; his receptiveness merely kept Ishme open. She would take the slightest displeasure from him as excuse to leave. Lagat needed to draw them in, get them curious, invest them in her secrets. She needed to tell a good story.

     “What is it?” she read on her daughter’s lips as the girl took a step closer to the wood-rubbery ramp spiraling up into the ceiling and down into the stone of the spire.

     “It is a fungus,” she answered. Let them ask the questions, work to draw her out.

     “Why is there a giant fungus in the compost chamber of your college – actually, I suppose that is not so farfetched. But disguised as Shalidor?”

     “The Dark Elf mushroom tower?” suggested Negmeg. Many used to come from Morrowind to study here.

     Lagat shook her head. “That is true, collier, but this individual predates that by a good decade; that one is merely a sort of graft, actually. _This_ is the central thallus of an individual whose hyphae extend throughout every crack of the college, and down to the forgotten depths below.”

     Ishme grunted. “Again, why? Why have such a thing, and hide it behind a spell?”

     “We have such a thing because it is the primary physical element holding the place together,” Lagat replied once she had processed her daughter’s words, “and because it acts as a conduit for magicka from below, bolstering the rhetorical integrity charms doing the rest of the work. Your husband no doubt knows more about the exoteric history of this than I do, but you, Ishme, perhaps may not be aware that there was once a true city here, in Winterhold, and much grander in aspect than what you saw outside. It was once the capitol of all Skyrim, actually. But, about eighty years ago, the city suffered a massive cataclysm. Enormous waves came down from the north. Earthquakes shook entire cliff faces down from the mountains to the south. By the end, an entire section of the shoreline had simply collapsed into the sea, leaving almost no trace there had ever been a city there, not even in rubble.”

     “The College was the only original structure to survive that event,” she went on. “I use ‘survived’ loosely here; all six of the school’s outlying towers were also destroyed. The main campus, too, threatened to crumble away if not drastically bolstered. This fungus was inoculated here to temporarily preserve the keep, and eventually became a permanent, integral component of it.”

     “A castle with ringworm,” Ishme said, baring her teeth. “Unsanitary, sure, but why hide it? Pride?”

     “Initially, yes,” Lagat said. “But before long the illusions the mages put in place here became far stronger than they could have ever wreaked – too strong for them to penetrate. Those who knew the truth died, and left only the protocols for the preparation of mycelial mortar. These are still used to this day. Almost none have known there was anything unusual about Shalidor here since then – at least, until recently.”

     “When you discovered it, because you have – somehow – become a master of illusion in only a few years.” Lagat scowled at her.

     “I have fewer special gifts than you do, daughter,” she said, “and magic is not really one of them. I am Archmage here only because I am the only person with any idea how to keep the place running. In truth, I am a mediocre to passable mage by my own talents. But I have stared into the Eye of Magnus, and seen the true nature of our reality, and that tends to help one with illusions.”

     They blinked at her for a long moment. Lopital trudged forward in the stillness to nudge her pouch for a treat; she slipped them a sweet carrot.

     “The Eye of Magnus?” Negmeg spluttered. “Really? I have only ever seen third or fourth hand accounts of such a thing, all early first era or late merethic. I always though there must have been a purge of writing on the subject.”

     “I do not know if that is the case,” Lagat said, taking Lopital’s lead and stepping on to the fungal ramp, “but I know how long it takes to get to the bottom. Come along.”

     “Mother! Wait!” Ishme yelled, loud enough for Lagat to hear even around the first bend, but she pretended otherwise. The long climb would be a deterrent in itself. Besides, it had been a long day already, and a long look of walking still ahead; the sooner down, the sooner she could sit. Each step pulled tension through her back and shoulders, her jangled neck. Old pains, but not the pains of age. They were almost as old as she was, but one never really acclimated to pain.

     It took them only a few minutes to convince themselves to follow her; she lightened their eyes by degrees as they caught up down the dark curves. Ishme drew up by her side, snatching the mule’s lead from her fingers and cooing into their ear.

     “Glory be, mother,” she said, loud enough to hear but with the feel of a mutter. “What do you even mean, about the Eye of Magnus?”

     “You may wonder why the builders bothered to send their thallus so deep in the earth,” she lectured blithely. “Well, I will cure your confusion. Although the College was left standing after the collapse of the rest of the city, the earthquakes had opened great fissures hidden in the pillar of its foundation, so deep and numerous that the entire monolith began to crumble.”

     “I’m no mason,” Negmeg said, “but don’t plants tend to split stone, not hold it together?”

     Lagat creaked her head around to send a withering glare over her shoulder.

     “Fungi are _not_ plants,” she said, “and hyphae are _not_ roots. They lack a vascular cambium and thus do not possess secondary growth, so they do not widen through the years and push apart the surrounding stone as happens with plants.”

     “You never stop, do you Mother?” said Ishme, grinning around her tusks. “Where did you learn so much about fungi? Used to be you thought mushrooms were good for nothing but a punishment soup for naughty children.”

     Lagat’s cheeks heated, but she ignored the question. She didn’t need to know that part of the story yet, anyway.

     “The mycelial mortar successfully steadied the College,” she said, “but it led to a discovery that claimed the lives of all who learned of it. While investigating a sudden spike in the fungus’ growth, certain mages hollowed out the primary thallus – _this_ thallus – and realized that their mycelial mortar had grown all the way down to the very source of the tragedy.”

     She wet her lips, and took a moment to fondle the ears of the kitten listening alertly from the sling of one of her scarves. A moment of suspense, carefully placed, could multiply a tale’s stimulatory mental effects – especially if just long enough that the listeners could not break it themselves.

     “They broke through the ceiling of a series of massive caverns beneath the ocean, kept somehow clear of complete flooding. They explored, and as they did it became clear that it was these caverns that had opened up to swallow Winterhold in its entire, for they found all the city’s ruins there, houses and temples and Hoarfrost Hall smashed upon the salty stalactites.”

     “The survivors – and there were a few, even of such a fall – were of course long dead; it had taken the mages months, years, to first recover from the tragedy, make repairs of their own home, and finally to discover and explore the caverns. When they did realize what had happened, they chose not to reveal their discovery to the rest of the survivors on the surface, not even to the new Jarl. Perhaps they just wanted to leave old woe buried, but I expect their reticence was otherwise motivated.”

     “For the ruins of Winter’s Hold were not all those mages found beneath the sea. No – they found something much older, and much stranger: an enormous city of the vanished Dwemer, large enough to house much of their nation at its height, and unlisted in any source Chimer, Dunmer, Nord, or even Dwemer.”

     That ought to put things together for Ishme – indeed, Lagat watched as the understanding rose on her daughter’s face.

     “The archive of formulae you spoke of,” she grunted, and the Archmage nodded.

     “Correct. Although severely damaged by time and the collapse, and, at that time, mostly flooded, the city was so huge and so sturdily and sustainably constructed as to leave many areas accessible for exploration. Explore they did, gaining access to the structure easily enough with the defensive and security systems deactivated by the fall… or otherwise occupied in repairs. By common agreement they kept no record of what they found there, but one wrote that it contained the ‘secret of secrets, the darkest abyss of the deep folk, shame of the Dwemer.’”

“None lived to break the agreement and add more to that account. Within weeks of entering the caverns, every member of the party lay dead, their bodies ripped apart from within by enormous growths.”

“What was it?” asked Negmeg. “Some kind of disease? A parasite?”

Lagat shrugged. “No one knew. Perhaps a defense left by the Dwemer, some ancient pathogen activated by the fall of Winterhold. Much life sleeps, mouldering in dreams amongst the bones of the earth. Whatever it was, it has abated since – it has been nearly six months since I first entered, and no harm has come to me. Perhaps further exploration would also have been safe then; regardless, the new Archmage chose instead to hide the thallus passage in illusion, and over time that illusion hardened until even she doubted her own memory of what little truth she knew.”

“Until you saw threw it,” Ishme finished. “What took you down to the compost heap, anwyay? Weren’t you Archmage by that point?”

Lagat shook her head. “Some time passed between the death of my predecessor and my appointment to the role. In between, I carried out my duties to the College as usual. Those duties routinely brought me to the composting chamber – I was head of the Department of Architectural Inculcation, after all.” All true, but it had not been matters of mycelial mortar that took her to the glasshouses. A fool’s errand, rather, but she could not have known that then. “With time, and effort, I realized the statue’s true nature.”

 

_It was pies, the first time she saw it; snowberry pies baked late the night before in one of the older kitchens, where the must didn’t dry out until the ovens had run a full day and night. She’d sent imps out to gather them from the autumn valleys, too busy with the Archmage’s duties on top of her own to pick them herself. Berries were best picked by the baker; imps never knew how to tell the sweetest from the bitter, and ate half the basket beside. Straw included, sometimes._

_She’d meant to just leave them on the oversized potting bench where he prepared the special medias for the regional glasshouses above – and, most days, where he ate his meals, tossing the dieffenbachia leaves he used as plates in amongst the sporulating black loam when he was done. She’d kept well clear of the dirty little door to his tiny room between the compost bins; it was best to limit the perception of imposition in the patient._

_But the statue of Shalidor had caught her eye as she turned to go. Something was different about it, something was missing… Always before it had been covered in tangles of lush ivy, splayed across the ceiling, dangling down in frills and trills, but that day the ivy was gone, and only faint splotches of green stood in its place, seemingly part of the stone itself._

_“So it’s you,” he’d said then, surprising her out of her examination of the statue. He leaned on the jamb to his tiny room, bushy black beard askatter, eyes bloodshot, dirty overalls worn through at the knees. “I’d been wondering who kept leaving the sweets.”_

_“Good that afternoon, Erik,” Lagat had replied, drawing herself up. “I hope you enjoy them. Have you contacted that nirnroot farmer, like I asked?”_

_“I know how to grow nirnroot,” he said, smirking._

_“No doubt. However, you never know what someone else may come up with, so I expect to see the farmer’s return post within a month. Best to keep on top of new innovations, mm?”_

_He only shook his head, laughing silently._

“Mother? Mother!” Ishme’s voice cut through her memory, and Lagat realized they had come to the end of the thallus passage; the open caverns loomed beneath them.

“Gods,” breathed Negmeg, looking down. “No wonder the city just _vanished_.”

There was no movement to the space. It simply stood, like stagnant water, large enough to swallow a small mountain. It seemed merely to wait, and accept what came without question or credit. Directly beneath them stood the main tower, all carved Dwemer bulwarks and scuffed metal facings. The fungal thallus sprawled across it, clinging, probing greedily at its tightly sealed joins. Around that, what remained of the surface levels of the city, crushed to rubble in great splotches by the collapse of the ceiling. In some, sections of old Winterhold seemed woven into it like patchwork, dropped mostly intact from the shelf above. Flames even lighted some of their bubbled windows where her people, come from far and wide across the world to her call, had found buildings sound enough to sleep in. Cheery orange gas lamps lit the Dwemer streets where they were not destroyed, and the flicker of flames illumined patches of the distant walls and ruined floor; sentry parties, ensuring nothing nasty showed up out of the deep dark.

Lagat watched with them – she had not taken time to see it like this, to see the staggering breadth of the place; it had, of course, been completely black when she found it. Great slabs of stone and piles of debris cut off other sections of the cave, great teams of stronghold miners working to shore up the unstable ceiling with massive masonry. No call for this place to collapse on them again, after all. Lagat would have to teach them some inculcation, at some point; straight masonry wasn’t likely to hold up loads like that forever.

“So many people,” Ishme breathed, watching the tiny bodies inch by down in the broken streets. “Mother – what are all these people doing here?”

“They are living, girl,” she said, and turned away to continue down the switchback stairs along the Dwemer walls.

“Living? But why would anyone come to _live_ down here?”

“Because the world above clearly has no place for them,” Lagat replied. “Because this is where they belong, here at the bottom of the world. Because I asked them. Because, Ishme, because they needed a little hope.”

“Julianos’ nib,” her daughter gasped, and seized her elbow. “You didn’t! Tell me you didn’t! Gods, shut up, I know you did.” She drew a hoarse breath. “The children. The children are down there. You made them drop their lives. You gave them lives, and then you forced them to give them up. You made them come here to aid your mad little empire mongering. Just like you did me.”

Lagat jerked her elbow free. “Watch your mouth. I made no demands on you or anyone else. The children came because they chose to come, as did you. Some chose not to, of course, and some have yet to arrive, but no one was forced to join me. They came for themselves, and for their people. _You_ came for yourself, too, not only for your people; you will see that, in time.” She softened her voice, and took the shocked girl’s hand. “Come, Ishme, be calm. See the city. Settle in. Talk to the children – they have been asking for you. When you are ready, I will explain everything.”

She led her daughter down, slowly, mindful of her fragility. Ishme had always pushed back against ambition, against the work. But she would see its necessity, in time. She would see.

“I didn’t realize how many there were,” she breathed, looking out. “So many, through the years.”

“Yes,” agreed Lagat deeply. “And more will come. More will come.”

 


	10. Chapter 10

Sorry for the wait, again. Very busy irl.

**Chapter Nine**

* * *

_Penitent, the lives of all living are touched by Magnus, He Who Abstained. Lord Magnus drew up the schematics for our world, intricately sketching the diagrams of Creation. Magnus is with us always, in the magics of Mages and the warming breath of the sun._

-   The Gifts of Magnus 

* * *

    “God forbid we get what we wanted, mm hm? I hear you, I hear you. It always seems like that, doesn’t it? After you’ve struggled to change what you can’t accept. Mm hmm, you get there, finally, you sit down – you find out that nothing’s really different. It’s not easier, mm, it’s not better. Fact, maybe it’s harder because you look around, you see that everything you did was useless. Sometimes, bleeding out for things you don’t believe in just because you have to do _something_ or you’ll just burst. I hear you, shh, I hear you. God knows _all_ about that. That’s why it doesn’t forbid – it’s been all up and down and round the ways trying to figure out how to go about things, but it still hasn’t gotten there. God’s just like us, really. It has its devils – we have ours. I hear you.”

     “Used to be no one believed that. When I was young, you know. No one believed that God just had some stuff to work out. Mm. No, they thought it left because of them – because they were so terrible. You don’t want to hear the old confessionals. I believed it, too. We must be bad, right? If God – if anyone – would choose to leave us like that. Maybe that’s why we hated God so much. What an insult, to not be worth remaining.”

     “But it’s not really like that at all. You know when you’ve been on the other side. I hear you, I hear you. You understand too, of course you do. I spent a lot of years on the herd before I finally decided I couldn’t handle staying either. Lots of time. Lots of time to think, and lots of time to listen. Lots of time to forgive. That’s what it was always really about, wasn’t it? Forgiving people, mm, forgiving myself. Forgiving her… forgiving God. Not for you, maybe. But what about now? You got what you wanted, God forbid, but now you’ve returned. Did you want that, too? God forbid. No, I hear you, easy, easy.”

     “I still need to forgive. Would you believe that they killed me? My own choir. They wrapped me up in a grave shroud and sent me out here all alone, just Par to sing with. And now you, like stumbling on lost God itself. Funny – I always told them we had to learn to wait, but allow. God would return in its own time, when it was ready. But I found God when I left them for the black gaps where the chaurus roam wild, didn’t I? And I found you, here. God really is in the gap. Yes, god is in the gap. I hear you. But you can’t just drag it out. You have to wait. You have to let it rest, and return in its own time.”

     “I didn’t mean to drag _you_ out, either. I hope you know that. I’ve made that mistake before, struggling to change what I couldn’t accept. I wouldn’t do it again.”

     Admia ran her fingers over the stitch-writ in the silk sash around her waist. She had not read her prayer since her death. The other elf’s hand still clung tremulously to her cheek, though they huddled around their quiet crying. They’d been like that since Admia had first spoken – speech seemed to be the only thing that could soothe.

     “Useless. Completely useless. They’ll probably tear up my prayer, now. I don’t mean anything good to them anymore. They said, though – they said my prayer. A _lot_. The weavers were putting it on everything, for a while – prayer mats, prayer pants, prayer scarves. I have the first one, though. The first worn out old prayer span. I hear you. That was enough for God before. That was enough for hope. Do you think it will be enough for us both? Here, here, I hear you, but listen and answer.”

 

     “ _Why are you here? Why do you hide?_

_Why do you hate? Why did you die?_

_What should you do? What should you be?_

_How can you hope? How to forgive?_

_Why did God go? Why is God gone?”_

     The sobs had stopped, and Admia paused between the next section of the chant. The deep one’s fingers traced shiveringly on her cheek.

     “It was a long time before I came up with answers for those questions,” she said, running her fingers along the newer stitches below the first lines. “Only one answer, really. Who knows if it’s right, or really even helpful.”

    

     “ _Why are you here? Why do you hide?_

_For rest and return        for rest and return_

_Why do you hate? Why did you die?_

_For rest and reurn         for rest and return_

_What should you do? What should you be?_

_Rest and return            rest and return_

_How can you hope? How to forgive?_

_Rest and return            rest and return_

_Why did God go? Why is God gone?_

_For rest and return        for rest and return.”_

Their breath had turned heavy and deep; they were asleep. Admia laid their hand on the dusty, crumbling sheet, all that was left of the ancient bed in the secluded workshop.

     “If there is a right,” she went on. “But maybe that was the point. Some things are so hard to keep in your head except when you sleep, like us. They wear away in life. Heh. Rest and return. It was time for my rest, wasn’t it? You can’t just go on forever. At least, I can’t. Mm. I always needed lots of rest. You need even more, I expect. Mm. Hm. But it’s very hard to admit. No one tells us it’s ok. Well, most people don’t need the same kind of rest we do. Mm, I don’t need the same kind _you_ do. And _they_ need more than they think – it’s just not acceptable.”

     She closed the door to the little workshop, with a tiny ring, leaving the elf – the dwemer – to their rest. Just like a child, they were, when the growth pains pulled them into tight little knots for the years of their pupation. Admia knew the sound of those cries, well, though this elf’s body was far too loose and limber for that. She’d carried them out of the silent cistern, for they were too distraught to walk, and answered her queries in a language from which Admia could only pick out a few words. Deep speech. Not easy for her to lift that kind of load, but with the wall of the cube to brace against she managed it. The bed she took them to was unpadded stone, long deflated and covered only with a tattered piece of cloth, but she could not have left them in the cistern, not like that. Crying and all. She would have to bring bedding down to them; no way that she could carry them back up through the well, or guarantee that they could manage it themself.

     “I was always very hard for them,” she said as she clicked back through the chord-corridors to the cistern. “My abstinence – they never could quite accept it. Even when they themselves would have preferred _not_ , they _did_ anyway. Self-flagellation, because refusing was never what they were ‘supposed’ to do. They were taught to hate it in themselves just as much as they hated it in God.” The words flew forth, easily, smoothly. She had needed the silence of her death, needed it long and desperately, but the mood was off her and the other in its place.

     “And what to do with me, who never gave a damn about ‘supposed’? Mm. Mm. They listened well enough for a while – why? I was not like them, though I am very alike if they were honest with themselves. Or if I were honest with myself. We all need to step away sometimes. Maybe. Mm. Maybe their step away was listening to me at all.”

     “In the end they had all the power, all along, of course, of course. I had to listen to them all my life, step away from myself every day just to survive in their world. They listened to me for a little while, mm, but then _their_ rest took _me_ away forever. Theirs was always the power to choose my life. God forbid, but they gave me what they thought I wanted.”

     She had come to the cistern doors, and the silence surrounded her. She moved through it with calm, striding between the fuzzy lurking lights of the water. On the central platform, where she knew that large pipes would be pumping water up to the rest of the gap, Admia unwound a length of silk from around her waist. She wrapped one end tightly around her fist, then hugged one of the pipes and wounded the other end about her other fist. Thus prepared. She hooked her prosthetics, her tarsi, around the pipe as well and, with jerking exertion, climbed rapidly up to the ceiling. A branching line led her across to the well’s opening, and she clambered out into the refectory.

     “But the truth is that I still don’t care about ‘supposed,’” she said as the door rang closed behind her. Her crutches were back in her hands, snatched up from the refectory floor and comfortable, convenient. “Rest and return. God _doesn’t_ forbid, though, does it? God has no right to forbid. God only has the right to allow. To allow everything we are. That’s where _we_ fail – we don’t allow. Rest _or_ return. And we should. And I will, and I don’t care that I’m supposed to stay dead. Mm. With a deep one… well, they probably don’t care about ‘supposed’ either. Or they wouldn’t have _returned._ From a silent well; God, another silent well. What did the ignorance of ‘supposed’ get me before, mm? And yet – it’s already done, ‘supposed’ be damned; a deep one resurfaced in silence like that of God itself.”

     She made her way to her nest, gathering up the supplies the deep one would need down in the cut off section. One of the cat furs, wrapped around Admia’s shoulders and fastened with a thick chitin pin, and a large dwemer basket of mushrooms, hooked on her chitin belt. Thus prepared, she loped back through her singing gap to the silent refectory.

     “How was that _allowed?_ Returned from the silence of God. Not even God is allowed that. That’s the entire tyranny of death – not even God is exempt. And they broke it. The Atmorani still hold the Promise deaf beneath the earth, just as they hold us blind, and the loud mouth devil keeps the broken Stair, but a deep one returned from the silence of God. Mm. From the _tyranny_ of silence itself!”

     “And just like a child, like a child they screamed. Mm. No scourge songs there, mm, not like the tales. No terror, except for themself. That is the way of it, though, isn’t it? Our own terror drives our own terrorism. And children – ah, they do learn it early, though. But not from birth… not from their first wail.”

     The black quiet of the refectory, and Admia felt her careful way to the well. She climbed down, more slowly, ponderously than she had come up, but easier with her crutches back. Best not to dump her cargo for the lurkers. She unhooked herself from the pipe at the bottom and followed the dark path over the water, out of the silence.

     “But you can’t expect children to solve your problems. Mm. Even if they come from the silence of God. What sadness brings you back into the world in tears? Not even my sadness. Not even my struggle.”

     She knocked gently on the door gongs before entering. A small scuff sounded from the direction of the bed slab, a slight indrawn breath. So they were awake, probably sitting up. Admia sang a soothing twin-tone before speaking.

     “I brought you some nesting,” she said, unfastening the cat fur from around her shoulders. “And some food. Mm. Sorry, no meat – do you eat meat? – but I didn’t think to go to the cold vault.” She clicked forward to lay the fur on the slab and set the basket of mushrooms beside. The elf said something in their unintelligible language as Admia moved to sit at the nearby table, gripping the edge for guidance.

     “No idea what you’re saying,” she replied. “Not my language.” Of course it wouldn’t be. How could it? If Admia was right, if they really were a deep one, they had been dead for almost four hundred generations. They wouldn’t speak her language even if they had known her ancestors.

     She listened to their breath in the ensuing silence. A breathing blasphemy. A scared child. A hope of return. Grace.

     “Xhow – you khallen?”

     Words like stone tablets. It took Admia a long moment to work out what they meant, and to overcome her surprise that she could understand them at all.

     “My name is Admia,” she answered. No kin name; what would it mean? “How are you called?”

     Another long silence for the beating of their hearts in the chamber’s quiet rhythm, as the other elf processed what they could of Admia’s words. Then they answered, their voice a broken alto.

     “Arimatha.”

     “Areematta? Arimuthuh. Arimatha,” Admia iterated, the deep one repeating themself carefully. “Arimatha.” No kin name from them, either. But no more would that have had meaning. They were the only one of all their kin.

     “Beautee bred,” they said. “Blaberen forther?”

     The ancient Falmeri dialect took several long moments to process, again, but when it did, Admia laughed.

     “More talk? Ha! Blaberen forther, yes. I guess you really did like my rambling. Mm, you hear me? Mm. You’ll tire of it soon enough I expect; it’s just the two of us here. But then, I expect I’ll tire of it too. I always do; the moods never last too long. The problem. Whatever state we fall into, our need for it wears away and we have to struggle on anyway, because it’s not ok to anyone that we leave when we need to and come back when we can. They’ll _hate_ you for that, at least, and at worse _prevent_ you from coming back to life at all. Listen to me. Listen to God. They hate God for leaving _so much_ that for so long they were _glad_ the devils came. They don’t want to allow its return. I convinced them for a little while, but then – ah. Mm. I took the consequences of having stayed with them for too long.”

     “I always thought God had the right idea. Skip, but leave a promise of possibility. Don’t rule out coming back, because, mm, maybe something comes out in you that _does_ make living ok. You hear me? That was the miracle. Not something _we_ can do. Just not possible. Though the deaf mothers tend their children, so I thought… but even like that they wouldn’t leave you to it. Abstinence is evil to them, reflexively. They don’t even know why. Mm. You hear me? Mm.”

     “So maybe your folk had the better way. No going back. No second chance, but you wouldn’t care would you? _Did_ you? There are plenty who would drag others back from that, if they could, and call themselves saviors for it. They _congratulate_ themselves for having forced others to stay in pain they don’t even share. And they’re never even ashamed – no, they’re proud. Mm. Then they leave you to bear it. Mm. Guaranteed, irreversible – that’s the way to go.”

     “But here you are, aren’t you? Reversed. A tyranny of silence specifically contracted to bring you back against the greater tyranny of death. What secrets from the silence of God? What secrets of the lurkers beneath the waves? Could you teach us that allowance? Could your silence smother the oppression of noise above? If you could understand me, could we end my death, restore my people? If you could understand? And if we did, mm, what, what? If we did restore the Promise, would the cycle eventually wear just as much as everything else does and leave us trapped in pain forever? If –“

     She cut off, gulping hard.

     “God forbid we get what we want. God forbid.”

     But God does not forbid.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Ten**

* * *

 

_It's eerie to walk through a Dwarven ruin. It's supposed to be empty, deserted, but the lights continue to glow and the pipes continue to steam. It's like the place is waiting for someone to return, as though the Dwarves just stepped out for a moment and haven't been gone for hundreds of years._

\--Dwemer Dungeons: What I Know, _Kireth Vanos_

* * *

 

Arimatha shrank back into the fur's tickle as Admia talked, drawing it close around her bare shoulders. How long since she had felt? A null infinity; the touch was both familiar and raw. Long enough for significant linguistic drift, for she could only vaguely identify a sporadic word from Admia's monologue. Not long enough for her sin to have faded from Falmer eyes. No matter the time; it was irrelevant. Everything was changed, whatever year she had entered. And, fundamentally, nothing was changed. She felt that in her bones.

And yet there was this Falmer, not condemning her, not chasing her out of the hold, but merely talking in that language, unfamiliar save for its layering of overtones. She filtered her voice effortlessly, selecting harmonics so clean and precise the guttural fundamentals melted away almost completely, her vowels mechanical in their exact colouring of her words. There was an entire language of connotation there, hidden in the invisible intervals. A talent honed physically as well as mentally; the nose and nasal cavity had been restructured for better resonance. They had always tried so hard to learn the khoomei, while they still had hope, but Arimatha would not have expected that much dedication. Especially not in one who still had hope enough to talk to someone like her. The harmonic hope of the Dwemer had failed her ancestors, after all.

She studied Admia in the dim light of the standby lamps. Thin, pale skin, burrowed beneath by gnarled blue veins. Wispy white hair. Swollen knuckles, splotched red with interlocked ringworm; bowed limbs and stooped back. Strange, that they should remember and, indeed, advance the vocal harmonics, and yet neglect something so much more basic. She was a textbook specimen of heliodeficiency syndrome. It had happened among them sometimes, too, of course - if some anti-pescetarian child refused to take their sun treatments, sickened by the brightness, or to eat their irradiated pilii. But never so severe.

Arimatha's cheeks had dried, skinned stiff with salt, by the time Admia's musings drifted off into silence. Her breath came evenly, her heartbeat calm. The psychosomatic pressure was eased, for the moment. Time to close the valve; there were other practical considerations requiring attendance. She stood, holding the heavy fur closed around her.

"Back to it," she said in Falmeri - the Falmeri she knew from her assistants of old, of course, not the descendant tongue Admia spoke. "Though what 'it' will be, now... is unknown. I don't think I ever thought quite this far. Too hopeful. But there are the basics to take care of." Food. Clothing. Language. Knowledge. Admia puzzled over her words for a long moment, her face slack and expressionless. Then she replied with a sentence too quick for Arimatha to catch and hopped up onto her nimble tarsi, those clever chitin prosthetics.

"My apologies," said Arimatha. "We need not leave quite yet. I should first see what remains here."

Admia tilted her head, following Arimatha as she stepped past her to adjust a small dial in the wall. The lamps brightened from their turquoise balm, but she left the neons off and only brought the lamps to a third of their strength; Admia's ancestors had not dealt well with bright lights, and judging from the raw ringworm rash around Admia's eyelids, the condition had not changed.

Her workshop awakened in sepia shadows: her desk, scattered with jumbled bins of metal sigil forms and the tattered remains of her parchment design pads, the bed and wardrobe she had brought down when she cloistered herself there for the last years of her former life, the gleaming shelves loaded with bound books. Old-fashioned, but not reactionary; she was just old, and bound books were what she knew. There was none of the Eggheads' inertial ritualism in them - just plain inertia. Before, she had rationalized that they were not entirely impractical - no lexicon or fiche carried its own coterie of pseudoscorpial animunculi, and so could not extend protection to nearby physical sketch media - but, seeing the state of her drawings and threadbare bedspread, it seemed that idea had never been well founded. Even all the defensive microscopic constructs of this many books could not extend much protection from textile and paper pests of other objects over - however long she had been gone.

Her collar lay on the desk beside her pen; a thick memnonium chain, inlaid with tiny, dormant weaver constructs. A few last scraps of silk crumbled away from the metal as she picked it up. She had been sitting right there, when she left.

She pulled the culture vial from the centerpiece link, analyzing the color of the fluid inside by the light of the lamp at her shoulder. Milky sludge; it had died long ago, without its daily diet of oil stains and mending silk. She buckled the warm metal around her neck anyway, beneath the fur. There were plenty of starter cultures to be had, if that part of the hold was still intact.

The pen, too, was long dead, gone dry even in the steamed air. She moistened the nib on her tongue just enough to restore the ink left there, then scribbled a quick sigil on her palm. Water pooled in her hand until the ink ran, and she unscrewed the end of the pen to fill the reservoir with water, shaking it to hydrate the ink inside. Then she capped it, and folded it in her wet hand. She could draw quickly, if she needed to.

Those two items were all she really needed from the room, for the moment, so she hoisted the heavy fur back onto her shoulders and knocked on the memnonium doors to tell Admia she was ready.

They left, walking side by side through the dim halls. Admia's head swiveled this way and that, bobbing in and out to catch the sound of Arimatha's footfalls and guess her intent; Arimatha kept a sidelong vigil on Admia as she scuttled along on her chitin legs, but the Falmer clearly needed none of her help thus far. Neither was really sure who was in the lead, but when they came to the fork that led either to silent Vogram, the cistern of her hopes, or back toward the rest of the hold, Admia took a decisive turn toward the silence.

"Not that way," Arimatha called, catching her elbow lightly. "There is only the cistern, there." And she was not quite ready to make that visit.

Admia mumbled something melodically puzzled, her wasted face still blank, but turned to walk with Arimatha. Bare feet warm on stones heated by rushing steam, Arimatha led her to the exit of her cloister, closed as she had left it, the door seamlessly concealed in blank wall. Admia must have come down in a different way - strange. She trilled the lock quickly and stepped out into Rkund proper.

 

First the switch room: hemmed in on all sides by cords and conduits and piping in all diameters until the door was barely accessible. Admia waited outside, listening alertly, as Arimatha stepped inside the cramped room. A flickering neon tube spat lumens across the patched console and the array of levers, dials, switches, barometers, keys, voicepipes, and widgets. She sank into the familiar old chair briefly, leaning in to check the hold's homeostasis in the dim light. Aquifer pressure was high; to be expected when the only water consumption had been from autonomous systems since she left. The turbines were producing at half-capacity as she had set them, but one of the boilers had failed and been replaced by a backup. Other than that, everything seemed still in good order - the seismic damage to the upper hold notwithstanding, but that had been old long before she left. The last petroleum pocket her family had tapped was gone empty, but the jelly fields seemed to have more than made up the difference with their profane hydrocarbons.

No doubt the animunculi field would need recalibration, if she had been gone long enough for that depletion. Indeed, its recognition was definitely off-kilter, for none of the automata they had passed in the halls had shown any response to Admia's presence. She probably would not see it done, though; just as well to leave it alone, unless serious problems arose.

She did not lift the hold from its general standby, but manually adjusted the gas lighting up a third notch, leaving the neons extinguished. Then she flipped the remote switch for the cryogenic vault; might as well start the partial defrost cycle while they walked.

Admia said something in the cant of curiousity as they headed off into the slightly brighter halls, her wispy head bobbing and weaving.

"Is it too bright?" Arimatha asked. "I can decrease the flow rate, if you require a more dim environment." A pause, and then the Falmer said, clearly, "No,"and something else Arimatha could not understand. She did not respond, and after a moment Admia repeated herself.

"I do not understand," she replied, touching Admia's elbow gently to direct her along their route's turns. Admia struggled for a moment, then repeated herself with a slightly different phrasing, and this time Arimatha could make out what she thought meant 'how.'

"How did I adjust the lamps?" she said. "The room we were just at contains monitors and basic controls for many of Rkund's systems. Lighting is one of those." She doubted that the Falmer had understood, or even that she had answered the correct question, but she had not ignored her and that ought to be good enough for the moment.

Centurions bowed them through the double doors to the Condensation Cloister. Adsorption towers and coiled condensers lined the walls of the long hall, and thick sheaths of white frost encrusted the outputs to the storage vats of chilled and distilled air fractions at the far end; their insulation needed repair. The largest vat was ringed with stairs and a metal catwalk, three times her height. They climbed around to the top, Admia leaving her crutches at the bottom in favor of the rail, and Arimatha threw the lever to unseal the vat's cover. It opened with a pop and swung upward, revealing a field of frothing azotic air which immediately began boiling over the edge in a wave of bright white fog. There was no sound from the vacuum pumps, so the void of the submerged casket should have flooded with liquid azote. Another switch, and the center of the vat fountained silver spray as the top of the cylindrical vault contained within rose to the surface, and then opened in twelve sections, like sepals folding back beneath the bud. From this rose the Vault to the level of the catwalk, a thick memnonium cylinder covered in cabinets, shrouded in azotic fog as the refrigeration fluid boiled off the exterior.

Arimatha circled around, leaning in to the chill fog to read the designations engraved on each door. This vault contained inoculum for all the biological implements she might need - seeds, spores, cultural stocks, embryonic cell lines. They would be kept cold while she looked by the reservoir of azote in the center. When she had located the yeast cultures, she padded her hands against the bitter metal with the fur draped around her and released both clasps on the cabinet, then pulled the drawer of vials out on its extensible tracks over the catwalk; a healthy splash of azote came too, but most bounced down into the vat, and what did not was insufficient to affect her. That drawer was filled with tiny glass vials, each labeled briefly in spiky shorthand. After rubbing frost off the caps of a few to read, she quickly found what she wanted: the silk strain. There were at least two columns of identical starter vials, so she removed just two and then quickly shoved the drawer back into the vault. She marked each of these with a complex little sigil; they needed to warm from cryogen slowly, and she had forgotten to bring ice from the cold room alcoves off the hall.

That done, she resealed the cabinet she had opened and sent the vault descending back into its icy bath, closed the external cylinder, and lowered the whole back to the center of the enormous vat. Finally she switched on the pumps, to evacuate the space between the two cylinders (in case of failure in the azotic distillation systems, the vacuum barrier would insulate the vault for a number of years).

Admia's head jerked up as the pump's gulping gasps guttered on. She said something, and this time Arimatha hardly needed to know the words to understand the inquiry.

"Only a pump, Admia. I have retrieved a microbiological culture that can produce silk and create clothes. Once we retrieve another collar, you can have your own set of weaver constructs, if you like." Talking such detail was a fruitless endeavor, most likely, but given the situation it was likely that Admia understood her much better than she understood Admia, so perhaps not completely pointless. She inserted one of the vials into the central link of her own collar. Once it warmed up, the yeast would begin producing silk, to be spun out into clothing by the twelve weaver animunculi set into the rest of the links. More convenient than the fur, if not warmer.

Admia asked something to the effect of, "Are you ended?" Arimatha smiled.

"No. This facility has clearly been without supervised maintenance since I left. It will require repairs, and no doubt more than I already anticipate. For now, yes, it would be better to wait before seeing to anything else. But, beyond the moment... how could you and I, here, be anything but a beginning?"

 

* * *

 

Over the next weeks, then months, the lonely pair settled into an unstructured companionship. Admia would often accompany Arimatha on her errands around the hold - though the animunculi had kept the hold relatively well, there were still jobs they had not recognized or could not do; shifted stone to shore, leaks to patch, machinery to repair - but Arimatha quickly learned that there was just as much work awaiting the Falmer. The chaurus hatched within days, and she learned by demonstration how to rear, tend, and train the immature insects. She helped Admia prepare clever traps throughout the ruins of the upper hold, though she knew not what enemy they warded against. Sometimes they ate together and sometimes they did not, just as sometimes they found themselves working alone in the humming hold. The Falmer was taciturn and gregarious by turns, babbling merrily when the mood was on her, a rushing monologue that overwhelmed Arimatha's ability to work out the gist of her dialect. And when the mood was not, she remained monosyllabic at best, nonresponsive at her most inaccessible. Once or twice she had even outright run from Arimatha, vanished with preternatural evasion. Arimatha let her be.

When she was speaking, she continually drilled Arimatha on her language, at first pointing out objects as they worked and teaching her their words until she had a limited basic vocabulary, and later correcting her grammar incessantly and rattling through some set of memorized exemplary sentences; they quickly engrained themselves upon Arimatha as well.

Consequently, it was several months - one might say only several months - before they had their first real conversation.

"Where are your kin?"

"I do not know how to tell you. They are in Summersgap, and in the other gaps, but how your folk called these places I do not know."

They were in Arimatha's room - not her workshop, but her older room, in her family's apartments where she had grown up. The remnants of their meal stood cooled on the small stone table. Both Arimatha and her bed were clad in fresh silk spun from the memnonium collar at her throat; the weavers danced across her chest even still, reconfiguring the geometric embroidery of her robes in response to her activities. Admia, however, had refused to wear the collar Arimatha had commissioned from the animonculory for her, though she found it fascinating; she sat with her tarsi unbound from her legs, across from Arimatha.

"And where are your kin, mm?"

"They are nowhere."

"Mm. Is that where you were?"

"It is not a place. It is nothing - in fact there is no 'it' at all. Only absence."

"But you are present, and they are - not."

Arimatha nodded, then hummed an affirmative when she remembered that a nod meant nothing. After a moment, she spoke again.

"If you do not know our names for your homes, could we simply travel to them and meet your kin together?"

Admia cocked her head. "Why?"

"Because I - knew your ancestors," Arimatha answered. "Quite well. I would like to know what became of their children." Her children. Or so she had thought of them, before the rebellion - no, the revolution.

The Falmer sang a little ditty of disappointment, her hands clenched on her knees. "I hear you, I hear you. I would like to help with that, mm, but unfortunately it is not possible. I am dead, after all.”

"Dead?"

"To them. That is why I am here in this abandoned gap. They put me to sleep, laid me to my rest, never permitted to return. That is how they do, with those who have sinned too greatly for forgiveness."

"And what was your sin?"

Admia bared her sharp teeth, one of the first emotional displays Arimatha had seen from her.

"Bad policy. Mm. You know - as a leader, make a few bad decisions, well, it doesn't take much for your people to turn on you. I only tried to give them what they deserved, though. To return them to the Endless Gap where we belong. It's time - or, well, I thought it was. Mm. Apparently I chose a bad moment. The Loud Mouth - have you heard her? She's yelling even now - is just too much for us. Or so they think. And it is true that she breaks our ears with even her whispers..."

"So the Atmorani are still abound," mused Arimatha.

"Mm, yes. No one ever did manage to return them. And you, mm, I'm afraid, would be slain as soon as heard. So no. Unless I brought with me some way to truly beat them back, with my history, there's no chance we could go to the other gaps. Sorry."

Arimatha hummed again, staring off into the turquoise lamp flame. A twinge in her abdomen; a slight cramp. It would be time for that again, soon. It seemed she really had returned in full.

"However," Admia went on, "I am quite interested in your experience with my ancestors. I'm sure what I can tell you of my kin is no comparison to actually meeting them, for you, but it is better than nothing, mm? Perhaps we could trade our tales."

Arimatha shifted her gaze to Admia; the wispy white hair, the wasted skin, the red sin of the Dwemer beneath her eyelids. The would-be spark of another revolution - of course she would want to know about what her kin had been, before.

She sighed. "There is no need to bargain, Admia," she said. "I will tell you everything."


	12. Chapter 12

Sorry for the wait; I got married last weekend! Publishing this while on honeymoon. Enjoy!

 

**Chapter Eleven**

 

* * *

 

_The memory of answers torn from fate_

_The destruction of all who cannot wait._

_\--_ Song of Despair

 

 

* * *

 

Brital bowed into the shrieking winds, shoulders hunched, Oghma Infinium clutched beneath her furs. The apocryphal path squirmed beneath her feet as she forced one step after another, spinning off into a splitting infinity of scrollwork script in the maelstrom of time. Helices of text tightened themselves around particular potentials, sealing moments that could have been in the inky bark of inductive trees. Their roots wriggled in the winds as their trunks twisted serpentine upward into everywhere. Each one contained an alternate event from her life, visible through the bark's illustrated lenticels as it oozed through pseudo-vasculature.

The wind shredded her braid as she passed from one grove of excluded pasts to the next, lashing her face. She wandered at random, with only the scaled scenes for any indication that she neared what she sought. They seemed to have grown up roughly chronological - at least, the first moments she glimpsed were relatively recent, and became more distant in her past the further she pressed on; first her battle with the World-Eater, her sword and tongue through its skull and raging coils in every tree of that grove, though its teeth were also through her spine in many. None showed the World-Eater triumphant, but perhaps it was expected that the end of time would not be encapsulated within the possibilities of time itself. She trudged on.

The next grove was of her first kill; the watch towers outside Whiterun, only days after Alduin's deafening return and three-day row atop the Throat. Still weak, he had been then - weak enough to be run off by ill-grammared greybeards and a toothless scaled philosopher. She'd been at work repairing the the watchtowers, commissioned by the jarl's guard captain, when Mirmulnir had struck. He'd had no interest in her particularly; he had just thought she and her crew were ripe first victims. And they had been, for Brital had known nothing of swords or tongues, then. He would have surely killed them all, had the guard not come. And surely they too would have died had his flames not weakened the base of the tower, and had Brital not known the power of leverage. His broken body glared at her from within the trees, beneath the crush of masonry tumbled in a thousand different ways by her and her team, blazing with the light of her first taste of dragon soul.

Her legs burned and her face seared when she finally cleared the band of the ahistorical maze that held her years scouring Skyrim of wyrms. What a time that was, just after her awakening, flushed with the lust for the fight, for their experience, for their holy souls. Flushed with hope. Easy in herself for the first time in her life with that burning. Their bones rattled in their temporal cages; their souls seemed to rise like bile through her gut. Bitter bile, but there was no vomiting them back into the world. Not even she could do that, as much as she wanted to, after her failure with Alduin. The special gravity that precluded her corpse from the possibility poplars kept them buried within her.

The paths narrowed as she pushed out into the would-be wilderness, the trees that had been widely spaced and sparse near the dragon breath egress grown tight and grove-grafted. What linearity they had had was gone; moments from every epoch of her life before her awakening crowded close, pressing in with their inky lenticels. But still she did not see what she had come for.

But then - she stepped around the twisted bole of her adolescence, and a spacious vale of scrunching paths and swirling trees spread out before her, and she knew her search was done.

Within each trunk a girl thrashed in dark waters. Brital wandered from one to another along the scripture, watching the bubbles stream from her mouth, past the floating golden hair. Chains pulled her muscular legs and arms taut and bent her back like a bow, fastened by iron spikes to large blocks of sharp-edged basalt. She shuddered violently, flexing her spine in mindless spasms, seemingly in response to the jerks of a golden loop pulled tight about her chest, straining against the draw of the basalt. It was she for whom Brital had torn apart time.

With quick motions, Brital pulled away her outer furs and wrapped them carefully around the Oghma Infinium. A twirl of her charcoal pulled a line of text taut around the bundle, smudging the whole into a line of textual support at her feet. The winds in that valley were less fierce than elsewhere, but still they ripped at her skin, lashed her with her own hair. She stepped forward, and without preamble stabbed the nearest trunk with her charcoal pen, ripped it open along its written length, and leaped into a past that could have been.

 

_"Pull! Godde be damned, pull!"_

_She appeared in an ancient stone-walled garden, its fronds turning amber with the fall. An equally ancient well stood at its center, and at its edge two women wrestled with a gleaming golden rope._

_The first, nearest the well, was dark-skinned and wild with buttered curls, sticky with sweat. The second was an elf, and as tawny as the rope she clutched. Muscles roared and ripped on both their arms._

_"She be too heavy! Godde, she be too heavy! Do it, Case! Do it!"_

_And as Brital watched amidst the bent dried flowers, the elf's amber hair began to glow, began to curl off into invisible skeined distances, and as it did the two women took steady, easy steps backward, dragging the girl up from the well._

_Then Brital spoke the word of death._

_The twining light vanished, and both women jerked forward to strike the well with a sick squelch, but dead before they touched the stone. The girl splashed once more into the dark waters, sinking easily beneath._

_She could leave it at that. The girl would drown, without her saviors. Their murder would be enough. But Brital had not ripped into the past for half-measures... and after all she had suffered, she wanted the girl's life to end under her own fingers._

_Vaulting the edge of the well, she plunged into the blackness; it swallowed her in cold and silence. The girl would be at the bottom. She kicked down, and found the pale flesh beneath her fingertips in moments._

_The girl floated belly-up against the chains, pinned at arms and legs by stone as she had always been. Her staring eyes, still barely alive, seemed barely surprised to see Brital emerge from the scant light of heaven._

_Her throat gave no resistance in the Dragonborn's scarred fist, and the past collapsed in a rush of silent water._

 

Brital pushed herself up on the apocryphal path. The girl's dead eyes gazed through the ragged rip in the tree before her, filmed with blood from the force of Brital's throttle. She turned away, and picked up the bundle of furs containing the Oghma, unwrapped it, and flipped back through its pages. On an empty page, she wrote a single sentence with charcoal dripping with the ink of a mangled possibility.

And then did she reiterate her horror. A thousand times she tore into a thousand alternate possibilities, a thousand times she murdered the two women in the golden garden, and a thousand times she crushed the girl's throat in the silent dark. And with the ink of each did she scribe the same sentence onto the same page of the mystic Infinium, that collation of all potential tales.

Only when the last twisted tree stood torn, and all around her the girl's dead eyes gazed did she rest. The charcoal tumbled from her fingers; the Infinium fluttered in her lap. Her arms twitched with exhaustion, but she was not done yet. Not quite yet.

With trembling fingers, she tore the wet page of her scripture from the Oghma Infinium. It would not normally have been possible, that defacement, but she was between fates, between times, where many things impossible could be performed. She crumpled the page into a tight ball in her fast and, convulsively, swallowed her thousandfold sentence:

 

_"And Brital Stone-Stander died in the well."_

 

* * *

The trees pressed in so closely she had to turn sideways to squeeze past, pinning squirming roots beneath her boots. The path back to the opening of dragon breath had closed behind her as though it had never been; all around the trees crowded in, staring out at her with her own dead eyes. She would need to step back into the world to bring her new truth into existence. She fought her way free with voice and pen, slashing and shouting at the wrapping branches, the mouthing ocular pores. As she struggled just outside of the clamoring corpses of her drowning, her face passed within an inch of one of the trunks. And as it did, a watching lenticel suckered around her face with an inky squelch.

 

_A girl knelt in the forest, picking a scab on her leg with a pinecone scale. Blood trickled down her calf from a half dozen other sores ripped open by the wood. A scattering of scales surrounded her atop the brown needles, much like the mess of a ground squirrel's meal._

_She watched the clearing below as she picked. Ancient, overgrown stonework walled in a small courtyard garden bursting with every kind of fruit, berry, vegetable, and flower. A woman was drawing water from the well in the center, her dark skin gleaming lustrous in the sun, her head brandishing ferocious curls of white-blond hair to her waist._

_The woman straightened, and carried the filled bucket in her strong arms around the garden, kneeling to water the tomatoes and the peas, the squash and the cucumbers. The trees swayed gently in the wind; the cicadas screamed rhythmically. That done, the woman knelt before a brambly wall of raspberries with a woven basket and began relieving them of their issue with sharp, decisive seizures._

_Another woman appeared at the edge of the clearing riding a dun mare, its buttery coat only several shades paler than her amber skin, her hair a bundle of tiny golden braids. She wore a simple cotton shift that bared her arms and shoulders. Swinging down from the mare's bare back, the girl fixated on her feet, too big, too bare, crusty with soil-blackened callus. The first woman looked over to her but said nothing, and the second - an elf, she had to be, for she was taller than any Nord, with too-long fingers and face - came over to touch her back under the bombastic curls. The girl liked their silence; she liked being there to watch them, unseen and unknown._

_A length of glittering golden rope stretched from around the dun's chest and shoulders to around the neck of a calf standing beneath the trees. It bleated lowly every few moments, and looked her and there through the forest with liquid black eyes. The elf drew the other woman's attention to it, and the couple moved to the shade to fondle its soft ears and compress its anxiety with firm hugs._

_"Brital!" She jumped at the harsh whisper and fell over in the needles. Her mother crouched behin her a little ways, glaring and slashing the air with summons. The same white-gold hair was cropped close to the same lustrous dark skin of her head as the woman in the clearing._

_"Brital!" she hissed again, and the girl scrambled to her feet and reluctantly approached. Her mother seized her little wrist as soon as she was within reach and dragged her roughly away from the garden with its well and its women. She did not speak until they had gone a furious distance, and then she turned around to scrutinize the girl, running her hard hands over the flesh._

_"What are ye thinkna?" she said. "Chust runnin' off inter woodde like that on y'own." She spotted the blood on Brital's legs, and snatched her up into her arms, yanking her calves up to examine the bloody pits. "And ye been scritchin' again! Myn godde girlie, I thought we clipped them naille!?"_

_Brital scowled as her mother pressed open her fists to look at the nubbins of her nails, smeared with dirt and brown blood like the rest of her hands. "I wanted to see Auntie Aumsi," she said._

_"Brital," her mother chided, "Ye cannae chust go ramblin' off fer a visit whenever ye feels it. And ye know yer not sposed to see yer Auntie except she shows up on her visitin' day." Brital still in her hard arms, her mother began walking, heading north out of the woods._

_Auntie Aumsi lived in the wild southern foothills near Falkreath, and though she came to town every couple of months she never slept or ate with them, and no one in town would let her see Brital if she happened to be out on the streets. They were always somehow in the way with their conversations, or their wagons broke in the path between the two, or someone suddenly urgently needed Brital's help. The only exception was on her Auntie's visiting day once a year, when sometimes she would come stand outside their house and stare, stare, stare._

_"Why cannae I see her?" Brital asked as she watched the needles pass by overhead. "She's myn Auntie."_

_"Yea, but she ent well, girlie. It ent safe fer ye."_

_"Why not?"_

_"Because she donae whistle right. The Mad God's got her tune."_

_"She didnae hurt the littul calf a bt, or the elf neither."_

_Her mother fell silent for a moment. "Ye saw ta elf, did ye?"_

_Brital nodded. "Yea, with ropes inastead of hair."_

_"Mm."_

_"Why? Who were she?"_

_Her mother frowned deeply, cutting furrows in her dark cheeks and forehead._

_"No one what matters, she said "Chust a witch from far off."_

_It was not long before they were back in Falkreath from the foothills, though shorter for Brital than for her mother. She did not notice the corners of the hills, or the subtle alignments of the trees along the promenades of old. Most people did not, but Brital did, for she had been raised with their ancient clanlore as the bricks beneath her crib. For her, the edged streets of past Falkreaths sliced the forest through the duff and springing ferns, the earth crystallized beneath with the cubed blisters of old homes. That was not so bad; the younger Kreath corpses were worse, where the gritty gridwork of their municipal mausoleums still testified above the ground, unobscured, their corners still cutting the air._

_The build site Brital had escaped gleamed through the gridded grove ahead, the sun bright on the stacked stones. Ergnin and Ingmar were getting married, and the Jarl had decreed that the town would move south, and so south went the Stone-Standers. It was what her family had always done in the Kreath - raise each couple's castle at their marriage, and mason it into their mausoleum when both had finally croaked. Because of this, Falkreath was really much more expansive than the living city would suggest; it just had a lot of dead neighborhoods._

_But her mother did not stop at the build site; no, she ignored Brital's uncles as they laid the foundation in the gap of four freshly felled trees and instead pushed Brital into the saddle of their dapple mare, Hel. When she had unhitched her from the small cart they used to transport their tools, she climbed up behind Brital and heeled the horse off toward the houses of the living._

_Falkreath. The Fallen Town: or, the town of the fallen. So called, in most minds, for the grave grid, the underlay of mausoleums built by generations of Stone-Standers since the first men of Kreath, newly liberated from the worship of dragons, had descended to the misty vale from the Atmoran bastion carved into the icy precipice above. There were no ancestral homes in Falkreath - only the homes of the ancestors. Upon marriage, each couple commissioned a new home to be built for them apart from their parents, and the masons of the Kreath would build it with the chippings of the mountain. Upon the couple's death, they would seal for the couple's eternal occupation the home they had built, and the priests would consecrate it to Arkay, god of life and death, for had he not made them the promise of hope, that all those dead may yet live again? As a consequence of this mortuary consumerism, the town had assumed a revolutionary course through time, migrating with the feet of generations around the vale, paving over the streets of the past eventually and building up once more upon the shingles of the dead until the very shape of the hills and groves took on the angles of ages._

_In its current revolution along the spiral of time, Falkreath stretched along the eastern end of the vale, with the dying neighborhoods to the north where Brital lived with her family against the quarry cliffs. She pulled her dress down over her bloody legs as they trotted among the grey slabbed houses and their slate-shingled roofs, the planes of their walls and doors and windows intersecting dizzyingly through the tiny yards and streets, the captive flowers and imprisoned trees._

_Her mother yanked it back up. "Ashamed, are ye? Donae want anyone ter see? Then donae ye do it!" Brital squeezed her eyes closed; they were all out their in their cutting boxes, seeing her, knowing what was happening, thinking about it in their cloying human brains, talking in their cubed, cloned little words without caring whether she wanted them to;_ owning  _her in their knowledge. She breathed quick through her nose. Hel would be stepping on all the lines; Brital hated walking with people who couldn't_ see.  _That meant everyone._

_They dismounted; they were home, in the stoneyard where the blocks were cut and the mortar was mixed beneath a shallow overhang of the ancient cliff marking the boundaries of the Kreath. A little way off, the house filled in a section of the quarried recession precisely, descending straight from the upper edge in smooth pillars and tiny diamond windows. Aside from its location it was no different from any other house in Falkreath. They were not exempt from the traditions of interment; generations of Stone-Stander houses stretched eastward along the cliff, each one refilling the space their parents had quarried out._

_Brital jumped across the line of the cliff face, ready to get inside and at least be unseen, but her mother snatched her little hand swift. She led her off to the stream burbling past the stoneyard and sat her down on a block of granite near where her father stood sweating at the handle of the mortar mixer._

_He straightened up as he saw them, brow tightened. "Where in hell ye been off, girlie?" Brital clenched her lips at him._

_"At ta well, Engar," her mother said, as she dipped a pitcher into the water, and the two shared a secret look. "Aumsi were there."_

_"She do anythin'?"_

_"Nae. I caught ye girlie afore she could well notice she were there." She soaked a cloth in the water, then knelt down in front of Brital and began sponging away the dried blood._

_Her father nodded. "Ye cannae talk to yer auntie, Brital," he said. "It ent safe fer ye. how many timme I haff to tell ye? Ye cannae talk ta her." Brital nodded, still scowling. Parents always required nominal agreement, even when any idiot could see she didn't give a damn what they said except as awareness of an obstacle._

_Her mother sluiced the rest of the water over her legs, then dried them quickly with her skirts."_

_"Go on and chanche," she said. "Ye got blood on ta dress with yer scritchin'. Somethin'_ clean _, mind."_

_Brital nodded again, and hopped off the block. They wanted to talk without her hearing, of course, so she dawdled as she crossed the dusty stoneyard to the looming double doors of their house. She was not disappointed; they never had quite enough patience, and always attributed her tardiness to her habitual sulks rather than guile._

_"The girlie could use pantte," her mother said. "Somethin' ter keep them skeeters off'n her legge, an them handde off'n them itcherre."_

_"Mm. And better, somethin' ter keep them handde busy, ah? She be big enough ta work."_

_"A child, Engar? It ent good fer their bonne."_

_"An' she should bleed hersef out on ta earth? I'll giver ta light work, Greira. Of course I will."_

_She paused at the dark oak doors, just a little older than she, to glance back. Her mother scowled but nodded, and she pulled the doors open quickly before they could notice her look. One last snippet caught her ears as she stepped into the cave-cool of home._

_"She weren't alone, Engar. Ta witch were with her. Very friendly, they looked."_

_Brital went from dawdle to dart as soon as the door clipped closed behind her. She dashed up the steep stone staircase to the second story where her little room overlooked the stream from the high diamond windows. No use climbing the steps to look out; they'd expect that. Instead she tore a dress at random from her overstuffed dresser and changed in a vortex of cloth, then hurried back downstairs and out the door._

_They were standing there, arms around each other's waists, waiting for her. She kept her eyes on the ground until she stopped in front of them._

 

_"Brital," her father said, and she looked up into his black eyes, "Ye cannae go a wanderin'. I knew we a maybe kept ye too in the coop, but, well, we're chust afraid fer ye is all. We know ye need sompin ta do all day rather than chust ta cookin' and ta cleanin'. So." His hand went to his heavy leather workbelt, removing a steel chisel from its loop. "Yer gonna work with me now. Time ta start learnin' ta stone." He offered her the chisel._

_And little Brital took it from his callused hands, thinking of all the loathsome lines it had made, and of power over their evil in her hands._

 

In the space between times, the inky sucker of the tree released Brital's face with a pop. She jerked back, gasping. If that had been an alternate version of past events, it had certainly varied only minutely from  _her_ version. She couldn't have told what had changed; the pattern of the pine scales? the dress she chose? And why should the trees reach out for her at all in search of her subsumption? Perhaps the wooded eye, that pustule of who-knew, could exercise some influence in that place after all. Its interference would achieve nothing; she had already achieved her goal.

She marched on through the ripping winds and winking woods.

 


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Twelve**

* * *

_At this time, there is no indication that, as has been rumored, the object is in fact a physical part of Magnus, the god of magic. It has been proposed that the object is in fact the entirety of Aurbis in one physical space. This would of course mean that Tamriel, indeed all of Mundus, is actually contained within the sphere. It further suggests that we are somehow then outside our own existence while looking in at it. While the idea seems dubious at best, it has not, at present, been entirely ruled out._

* * *

 

     Lagat groaned as she settled herself into the stone armchair. She flexed her shoulders. The right had gone out of alignment; it jangled high and forward from her back. The muscles in her legs twitched spasmodically from the exertion of the day.

     Khadbah stepped into the sitting room from the kitchen, carrying a copper teapot and grinning with crosshatched dentition.

     “I didn’t think you could do it, Miss Lagat,” he said as he poured her tea. “Miss Ishme always said she’d never help with this sorta thing.”

     Lagat patted his hand as he passed her the cup. “Thank you, Khadbah. Miss Ishme is not truly here for the work, unfortunately. She only agreed to assist me in exchange for the knowledge this place has to offer.” A touch of scalding tea to her lips.

     Khadbah took his own cup to stand facing the window, looking out on the street. His round shoulders and barrel belly seemed to hover awkwardly in the space.

     “It’s been a long time, though,” he said. “And can’t you convince her now?” With magic, he meant.

     Lagat shook her head. “That would be abuse, Khadbah, and contrary to our cause. I can do much with this magic I have learned, but _should_ do little. And without it – well. It is very clear that I am incapable of convincing Miss Ishme of her duty. That must be your work. And the rest of the Children’s.”

     Outside the window, a crowd moved slowly through the pools of light cast by the liquid fluorescents on the stone streets. Ishme walked at its center, laughing and crying with Negmeg by her side as she greeted the clamoring throng. She could barely move for stopping to hug some rediscovered friend from the House, or to meet their manifold families, the toddlers and teenagers and pregnant mothers. Every kind of person was there, from every culture in Tamriel, but of course it was mostly Orsimer. Lagat had taken any child with need into the House, but it was Orcs who could never find anywhere else. Orcs, and goblins, and Argonians. Ishme had loved them all.

     She turned away, and took a gulp of tea.

     “What was the outcome of your assault?”

     Khadbah grimaced. “Nothing! They’re still growing like mad – especially the trees. They’re ripping the stones apart, and we’ve found three ruptured pipes so far. Wud-Neet can’t talk any sense into them, and nothing we tried – salt, fire, steel – affects them at all, at least so far. But worse is that they released their pollen while you were gone. Gads of it; we had drifts halfway up the walls at street ends. We swept it up, but it had some kind of corrosive coating that’s been rusting away at everything it touched. That’s why the air’s so dead; it got sucked up into the shafts and clunked up the blades. Khamuzi is doing whatever they do to fix it, though why we need the weird things anyway I don’t know. Whatsa difference in air?”

     “We need the weird things,” Lagat said firmly. “Anything else? Anything you know is important destroyed?”

     He shook his head. “It’s mostly fine. The spiders did the pipes. Khamuzi had to beat them away from the vents, too, actually. Probably they shouldn’t’ve, but no harm came of it. Yet. The trees have stopped releasing and the excess we dumped into the furnaces. Only problem is, now they’re fruiting great oblong droplets the size of your head. Don’t want to know what they’ll germinate into.”

     “We will deal with it. What about the Chieftains?”

     “That’s completely fine,” he said, shrugging. “Everyone’s sticking to their districts pretty much mostly. They’ve all got enough of the Family in their clans to keep them together, but even if not I think they’d give no trouble. Everyone Orsimer’s been just waiting for the call to go out again, y’know?”

     “I know, Khadbah. My call is not quite what they expect, but if it helps keep them together I will save the disillusioning for later. Thank you for the report. If you would, please remind Ishme that I will receive her here when she is ready to proceed.”

     Khadbah nodded, and came to give her a quick squeeze about the shoulders before heading out into the street.

     Lagat sipped her tea. The crowd outside paid no attention to the phosphorescent pseudo-junipers lining the median, their glowing aurora of teal and lime illuminating the streets and their roots bulging through the ancient paving stones, jutting edges beneath unwary toes. She could almost see them growing, plunging down toward the vital machinery far below. Four thousand years those strange trees had stood beautifully in their beds, and now… well, at least there was no mystery about it. She knew who to blame. But blame would not fix a thing; she would have to consult the archives to find a way to stop this new mischief.

     “Khadba! I’ll see you later, I promise!” Ishme, in the doorway, engulfed in Khadbah’s beefy arms. “Mother just wants to talk right now, I think. Come back in a bit and you can tell me all about your horticulture.”

     Negmeg jerked a nod at Lagat as he crossed the room with his irregular stride, made into an upright bob like a caterpillar in ragtime by the disproportion between his stunted thighs and over-extended femurs. His grey hair twitched with uneasy spent ink spells, and his pupils were slightly dilated. Well, a mother-in-law is one thing, but confronting the unknown affluence of your spouse’s prior experiences quite another. Perhaps particularly given the setting.

     The horned-moon grin slid from Ishme’s face as she met Lagat’s look, but the sparkle did not entirely disappear from her eyes. Negmeg poured himself a cup of tea.

     “I trust you found accommodations for yourselves?”

 

     Ishme nodded. “Yes, though everyone seemed to think we should stay with _them_ especially.” A moment of waiting for Lagat to inquire further; she did not. “But we decided it would be better to have our own quarters. This place is big enough for it. This must have been one of the Dwemer nation’s capital cities.”

     “In fact no,” said Lagat, lifting the pot to pour more for her daughter. “It was never inhabited.”

     “But we’re on the third level down,” Ishme said, taking the cup and a seat across the stone table. “Extrapolating, there must have been enough living space here for most of the Dwemer race.”

     “Indeed. But still, it was never inhabited save by those few who gave their lives to build it. In fact, they were the only members of their race who even knew of its existence.”

     “Then why build it all?”

     “For the future.”

     Ancient machinery hummed and groaned beneath them. In the corner, Negmeg stood sipping tea and staring blankly at Khadbah’s potted nasturtiums beneath their violet fluorescent lamps.

     “I don’t know what that means.”

     “Of course you do not. I have not yet explained.”

     “Consider doing so,” Negmeg said. Lagat lifted an eyebrow, but acquiesced.

     “As I said, this facility was unknown to most of the Dwemer people,” she began. “But to those who built it, it was known as Nchararaan. In truth, it is more of a pet name than a formal appellation; the chief visionary of the project was called Urthemz Araan Thelemac, the Ortholog. The others called it so after him, for his great excitement and enjoyment of the work.”

     “Foremost among those others were those individuals known to the Dwemer as the Paragons. At the height of Dwemer history, these were the most prominent members of their society, great thinkers, mathematicians, and engineers. Visionaries. I will tell you their names, because although they were never known outside of Dwemereth, hidden, for the most part, from external awareness, they should be remembered.”

     “Oldest among them was Muathand Cuolec Dlftnd, the Cosmograph, the inventor of the orrery. Next was Dhengmaz Radac Arkngthemz, the Polymath, early innovator of animunculi and creator of the Aetherium Forge. Khantum Dahrk Mezalf, the Merapodist. He revolutionized the subgradient enchantment process. Urthemz Araan Thelemac, the Ortholog, who I have already mentioned envisioned this facility. He also introduced the concept of non-dimensional logic. Bthalngn Demnal Sturdumz, the Didact, the inventor of lexica. Tcheningkh Velren Muathand, the Tychepath. She was master of the planes. Chief Tonal Architect Kagrenac, the Pneumatect, the clanless prodigy. To him, the Dwemer owe their absence. Tenziim Urkhaz Bthundz, the Zoetect.”

     “Of these, it is likely you have heard of but one, if any: Kagrenac, ‘High Priest’ of the Dwemer. For that he owes both his connection to their disappearance and his salvation from the ignominy the other Paragons fell into after Dwemer society was ripped apart by civil infighting after Radac’s death at the Aetherium Forge. I will not go into the details of that disappearance, but for you to understand the purpose of this facility you must understand, in broad terms, what they hoped to achieve with that and why.”

     “The Dwemer experienced constant dysphoria with existence. They could not accept the world; dissatisfaction was inherent in their being. Consequently, they sought a permanent escape from everything that was and could ever be. In Red Mountain, they found the divine essence of Lorkhan, instigator god of this world, who was slain by the other deities who participated in its creation. By linking their souls to his heart through an enchanted golem – the Numidium of Tiber Septim’s conquest – they utilized the god’s mythic mutilation to destroy themselves and vanish forever from the world.”

     “But this facility predates that project – of course – and its intention. And although Nchararaan’s purpose is completely opposite that of the Numidium endeavor, in some ways it served as a prototype. As I said, the disappearance of the Dwemer relied upon the Heart of Lorkhan, a metaphysical absolute of divine identity. Here in Nchararaan, the Paragons used a similar incarnation of the sacred: not the Heart, but the Eye.”

     “The Eye of Magnus?” Ishme interjected. “You seemed hardly interested in it before.”

     “I am not interested in _that_ Eye,” Lagat said, “though yes, it is the same one. Like the Heart, the Eye is a metaphysical absolute, and as such it does not exist in any particular location. What the Psijiics took from my school is only one of several interfaces with that fundament. The Heart was bound only by Kagrenac’s enchantments, to my knowledge, but the Eye has been bound simultaneously by several parties, and known by different names – the Eye of Magnus, the Eye of Auri-E, the Osseous Orrery of Elden Root. All of these enchantments access the Eye, but not all of them possess the same functionalities.”

     “The original interface _was_ that which the Psijiics took, however. Before the arrival of the Nords to Skyrim, it was the most sacred artifact of the ancient Falmer who drew those initial enchantments. The Dwemer who studied it during that time noted that the Falmer considered it a symbol of hope, and stated that it was best described as a field of absence created through the subtractive interference of all things possible and impossible. But at that time they had little further interest in it; it belonged to the Falmer, and as an embodiment of hope they found it torturous to confront.”

     “It wasn’t until after the Eye had been seized by the Nords that the Dwemer realized its importance. You see, Araan Thelemac, for all his talent and prestige, had the rare gift of humbleness. He conceived of the novel idea that, instead of sufferingly engineering a world they could not accept into forms that were at least according to their will, the Dwemer could engineer _themselves_ with the ability to accept the world. He seized upon the Eye as a tool to envision this new identity because of its plethora of potentiality.”

     “Unknown to the rest of the Dwemer, Araan brought together the other Paragons to discuss this idea. There was, of course, much debate, but in the end the Paragons decided to see the project through to its conclusion… some more zealously than others. In particular, Urkhaz the Zoetect embraced the plan, and it was his support that turned the scales to Araan’s arguments.”

     “Secretly, they began construction of this facility, to contain and control the Eye, basing their enchantments on those the Falmer had woven originally. Only the most loyal and skilled workers were allowed to assist in the construction, and those willingly sacrificed their lives to the facility’s animunculi field when it was completed. The Paragons alone knew of it, then.”

     “When all was prepared, they came together once more, here, in the facility below, to initiate the enchantments. They invoked mythopoetic engineering and the echoes of the Falmer interface’s proximity in Sarthaal to jumpstart their own. Echoing themselves the myth – or mathematical fact, as they saw it – of creation, each gave of their own spirits to the facility, as the gods gave to the world. Araan gave his very eye, and with that sacrifice, the Paragons created a new interface with the Eye of the world.”

     “This new interface was subject to both the original enchantments of the Falmer, being based on their work, and to the new functionalities the Paragons had introduced, which they would use to envision a Dwemer people sans dysphoria. They never did.”

     “Immediately after the invocation of the Eye, all eight of the Paragons were caught in the newly-mantled Eye’s void and subjected therein to divine visions that would change them even more than their sacrifices. All were profoundly affected, of course, but none more so than Urkhaz. He had supported the project more than any save Araan, but after his exposure to the Eye he demanded its immediate abortion.”

     “Urkhaz was unwavering, but the other Paragons were too shaken to come to a decision. They parted from Nchararaan, promising to meet again to decide the Eye’s fate and leaving Araan here to recover and tend to the Eye. But the time of the Paragons was over, then. War broke out among the Dwemer, and the Paragons were blamed for failing to prevent the sundering of the clans. One by one their dooms claimed them; Cuolec, the quiet passing of old age; Velren, disappearance into the aether; Radac’s haphazard suffocation; Demnal consumed by his own lexica. Kagrenac devised the plans for Numidium at this time as a more refined attempt at mythopoetic engineering than the Eye – and opposite in intent, for Kagrenac was deeply concerned by Urkhaz’ possessed opposition. And, of course, he brought the doom of them all.”

     “So they never managed to carry out their plan,” Negmeg said. “Unless Thelemac attempted it on his own, I suppose.”

     “Araan… did what he could, but no, he did not succeed. He attempted to reconfigure the enchantments of the interface, but by its very manifold nature it was resistant to manipulation by singular entities. Like all such misuses do, it ended in his destruction.”

     Lagat drained the last cold dregs of her tea in the ensuing silence. Ishme wore a deep frown, slashed down over her tusks.

     “Mother,” she said. “What you wish to attempt is very unwise. You tell us that the most intelligent, talented Dwemer there were did not succeed in this endeavor, and even demanded its destruction – and then you ask me to help you do what they could not? To use this eye to exorcise some metaphysical curse you think afflicts our race? What are you thinking?”

     “I think that attitude is part of our curse,” Lagat said. “The attitude of loss. The fallacious assumption that we can’t be better than others, that their failure forecloses our success. And I think we can do this, Ishme, you and I. We can envision a better future for our people as the Dwemer never really got a chance to do.  I’ve studied the texts. I understand the principles, and you have the maths needed to apply them.”

“The Paragons’ approach to interface was crude, preliminary. They were able to reconfigure the enchantments involved because they were intimately connected to them through the invocative mantling process used to connect to the Eye, but this disallowed many necessary manipulations. Kagrenac even learned from this mistake, constructing his famous tools to bind and control the Heart. We can do the same. I have in my possession the materials we need to construct three lenses of mythopoetic focus. They will allow us to warp the Eye’s vision as we see fit. We are not alone where Araan was, and I know the specific technical mistakes he made and how to avoid them. And I tell you – _I think we can do this.”_

“How can you know what Araan did wrong in his final moments?” Ishme stared, horrified. “How can you possibly know that? How can you possibly know _any_ of this? Are you gone mad, Mother? An archive you could have found, but these details are the innovations of a desperate mind! Only Araan himself could have claimed to know these things! Look at yourself! Look at what you are saying! How can you possibly believe you know what –“

“Enough, Ishme!” Lagat snapped. “I am not mad. There is a very simple reason I know things only Araan could have known.”

“Then state it!”

“He told me himself.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Thirteen**

* * *

 

_We know that we can never again be the Snow Elves and live freely in this world. We will forever be in hiding in one form or another. But there is no reason we cannot live life with the sun and the wind against our skin. There are those here who are friends to us and plan to help us once the threat has ended. We know now to survive we must be born anew. Outside, we will appear as though we belong here. Inside, we will carry our truth and our scars._

_\-- Faire Agarwen_

* * *

 

“I don’t know the full history of your ancestors’ arrival in Falmeris. That was both before I was born and before my ancestors came to live side by side with yours. And history was never my focus, so if you want all the details we will have to find a lexicon or fiche keeper, and I’ll read it to you straight from the old time proofs.”

“What I do know, from the basic lessons everyone had, is that your ancestors came here from the south, not from the seas. Some disagreement with the Wild Folk, I think – perhaps _over_ wildness. We found you wild enough, certainly, though never quite as unnerving as the lacustrine clans in the south.”

“Again, I do not know the details of your ancestors’ development here, but suffice to say that they embraced the snows and ice of the surface and differentiated themselves from their cousins amid the gymnosperms and glaciers. I think I heard, once or twice, that it was because they had found something they hadn’t realized they remembered in the Perspicillum Spire. I do not know if that is completely true, but it did seem to be the center of their culture. They built there a great palace; the house of their holies, the seat of their government, and a crux of education and engineering. It was the first observatory in the world, if I am not mistaken, and – ah. I hear you. An observatory is a building used for watching the movement of the celestial bodies in the Endless Gap. It was so tall that it pierced our world’s mundane membrane, touching – well, heaven itself – and drawing forth optical energy – magic – to fuel the enchantments that maintained their settlements.”

“They constructed those settlements primarily of ice, carefully sculpted to form frozen lenses that could channel the sacred sight harnessed by the Spire, and use it to preserve their crystalline integrity against temperatures exceeding the boiling of liquid water. There was very little darkness in those cities. The walls themselves shone with flowing phosphorescence, the guttation of heaven. They didn’t like to be away from the light, or deprived of color; they eschewed gems in their jewelery in favor of prismatic glass that could paint the snow as they hunted or drove their chaurus carriage-sleds. They did separate themselves from their light at times, in caves, or, rarely, in buildings of stone, but most of those who did so primarily for temporary periods of religious asceticism. On that, I am unfortunately not knowledgeable enough to expound. Among the Falmer I knew personally, faith had become painful to discuss.”

“They had many cities, from sunrise to sunset of the North, each connected to the others by roads of frost, channeling the divine vision of the Perspicillum Spire. We admired this in abstract, but thought it in reality to be excessively impractical and unnecessary. But we did not need it the same way they did – we were little given to frequent travel, and they required it for their very psychosomatic wellbeing. Without changing residences three or four times a year, they would become cranky, and their hair would fall out. The rich maintained manors in every city, and only the poorest did not have at least three small apartments. Even those who did not could not stay in one place – they would make pilgrimage between the various temples for charity, or steal milk from the mammoth memories along their migrations. The roads were always busy with travelers, those Falmer afoot always wary of the swift sleds and their proud chaurus.”

“Those Falmer I knew described it as the most obvious manifestation of their great love for change, for variety. They wanted to experience ‘every colour of the world,’ to taste everything there was to taste, good and bad, to hear every song and story there was to hear, to see every peak, every forest, every lake and river. That earnest spirit took them far outside Falmeris, of course, but it was here that they always returned.”

“This was… disconcerting, to my kin. We did not begrudge them their way, or refuse their frequent visits to our holds, but we could not understand them. I did try, myself… but without success. Their behavior was illogical to us; we could not predict what they would do. Though allowed, for the practicality of harmony, a Falmer visit was greeted with trepidation by most in a hold. We learned slowly the strange precautions we needed to take. Casks of beer needed to be fitted with special spigots that could not be easily removed to drain the barrel – our palates tended heavily toward bitterness, but almost all Falmer hated the flavor, and though they always insisted on trying things they knew they would not like, they were mercurial in nature and completely unrepentant of emptying entire vaults of beer in fits of offense at the flavor. But, peculiarly, they loved most other intense tastes, the sharpest sour, the most biting spice, the most overwhelming sweet. We quickly learned that glacial vinegar, for example, had to be locked up when Falmer were around, or their noses would need to be treated for burns from savoring the fumes. And I hope I do not offend, but we never quite felt comfortable when they were in the hold. We could not tell what they would do; outside, it was as likely to find them having complete conversations with trees or a fox as it was to find them foraging for budding leaves or hunting the same fox and eating it raw, blood slathered on their pale cheeks as it was on the snow. They adored meat of all kinds, as long as it was fresh. And, sometimes, we would look in their eyes in quiet moments and see a glint shining there as they watched us, and know they were wondering about hypothetical actions, experiences, exploration that Dwemer would never consider, for all our dutiful daring and disregard. Perhaps they felt the same way about us, though – they never would stay long among us. To our relief.”

“Despite our great differences, we did maintain a peaceful relationship for a very long time – for almost all of our history together. Until the end. When the Atmorani wyrms began to make landing and vie for their lands, we gave aid, resources, soldiers, and sanctuary where we could. And your ancestors held well against the dragons, when it turned to war – they had first offered welcome to the immigrants. But then their leader Returned, the bleak maw of ending, and they struck all at once at the Spire. The Spire itself was immune to their fires through your ancestors’ enchantments, but at its peak, at the very aperture in the world’s skin, was an artifact of focus they called the ‘Eye of Auri-El.’ It was –“

“No.”

“Admia?”

“I hear much of what you say. And the sound is good. But this I will not hear from you. We have preserved few songs from your time, but this is one of them. _You_ will hear it from _me_ when you have finished.”

“Very well.”

“The Atmorani ripped the Eye from its Spire. You must know that it was essential to the Spire’s function; without it, the Spire was unable to draw energy from the Aether. The enchantment that maintained the network of Falmer cities disintegrated. Without them, the ice they had used to build those magnificent cities and roads began to melt, helped by dragon fire. They burned the Spire away in one gigantic cloud of steam that spread across all Falmeris and, they said, caused rain for an entire month. They bared the mountain to the scourge of the wind and breathed in their sundering victory.”

“In a single strike, all of your ancestors’ shelter, defense, and magical abetment were eliminated, save for a few isolated temples and retreats. After that, they had little chance against the dragons and their men. They were broken.”

“But as shattered as they were, they did not fail to fight – and to fight intelligently. They knew that the only chance they had was to reconstruct their Spire, and for that they needed the Eye. It had survived its violent removal, and fallen to the south. The Atmorani found it there, and though they had no use for it they knew its importance, and so they took it north, to their securest stronghold. Almost not secure enough. Your ancestors organized a raid on the city to recover the Eye, igniting it in whole as they went, to distract and confuse their enemies. They almost succeeded, but at the Eye itself the son of the Atmorani king rallied their soldiers and defeated the Falmer agents, dying in the process. That death, and their king’s sorrow, destroyed any chance that the Atmorani might have allowed your refugee ancestors to escape and live in peaceful exile. The king ordered them slain or enslaved on sight forevermore.”

“There were other battles. I do not know the details of them, but they did include some minor Falmer victories – but in the end they were driven out of their own land completely. And those who survived came to us for refuge one last time.”

“Of course we accepted them. But this was not a request for temporary shelter, but for permanent residence. Terms had to be drawn, status codified; the refugees entered into negotiations with our king and counselors.”

“I am… certain that you know the outcome of those negotiations. First, because our lifestyles were so different, most Falmer did not have skills that were useful to us, and so they would act as servants until they or their children were able to learn a skill. And, second, they and all their descendants would sacrifice their sight.”

“I did not agree with… the counselor’s reasoning on this, but I will explain it so that you can understand why your ancestors accepted the terms and why my kin allowed it. One of our wisest reasoned that your ancestors’ reliance on sight extended to their very metaphysical identity, and, thus, that the loss of the Eye of Auri-El and their Perspicillum was a critical loss to their very existence. Unless they chose to somehow redefine themselves separate from it, they would be doomed to wither away and vanish completely from the world. It was not a universally popular idea among the refugees, of course, but it resonated with many who had come to believe that their expulsion from their home was a sign that it was time for them to embrace change as an entire people, as they always had individually. They agreed.”

“It was not intended to happen the way it did. They were intended to learn a skill and then move up to equal status with any equivalent Dwemer. But the loss of their sight did the opposite of helping most to cope with their changes; it rendered them deeply, chronically depressed. Consequently, most struggled to learn our skills, and, as a result, many Dwemer came to see them as… stupid. Talentless leeches taking advantage of our strength and abilities. Servitude turned to slavery, and, of course, slavery turned to revolution. And before that war could come to its just conclusion – we left.”

“That is what I know of your ancestors. I know this much only because I worked closely with many Falmer, before the enslavement and revolution. They were my friends, and they had a fierce longing to preserve who they were. They spent a great deal of time telling and retelling the stories of their past, to preserve them in their minds. Some of those stories they shared with me, to preserve in more reliable forms. But not all, I’m afraid. Perhaps the story of the Eye was one of those they did not share.”

“Mm. Maybe, Deep One, maybe. Mm.”

“And would you share something with me that they chose to keep secret?”

“I absolutely will tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because it is the story of the return of God… and so are you.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter Fourteen**

* * *

 

_For years all silent, the Greybeards spoke one name_

_Tiber Septim, stripling then, was summoned to Hrothgar_

_They blessed and named him_

_Dohvakiin_

 

* * *

 

 

_The sun beamed, but Brital glowered, folding her brow against the bright, a cave for her gaze to hide in. But weak shelter only; as light does, the sight of the sun acted in angles, reflecting from the mirror minds of the mortals frolicking in Falkreath’s rare warmth and fondling consciousness of her in each of their perspectives. She flexed her jaw. She huddled in the shade of the threat that was her face._

_For all the Kreath’s friendliness to her – its habitually shrouded skies and gaseous light that called every edge into question and hid the shifts of shade and hue, its migrating mists that made of each hill and peak a manifold mystery, its pattering rains that unnerved the mortal call to comfort, fogged mirrored minds and turned oiled collars up and insinuating noses down – for all this, Brital had never had faith in the land. There would always be those days when the overlay of angles that was the grey mist resolved itself into the sharpness of sunny rays, and humans that had cringed at the crying skies would crawl out to caress the facets of her in their cloying awareness._

_As they did then, glancing or staring or just watching the rattling wagon enter town; she felt herself reflected in their thoughts as the horses drew the wagon back through the town’s snaring lines, felt their perceptions fold and probe her, “_ Ah, Brital Stone-Stander, eighteen, the year of her first foundation, made surly by puberty,” _and then back along her last three weeks, her father beside her, her uncles seated in the back, gone for a month but returned now from the acid and mineral pools of Eastmarch where she must have waded for three days to find the perfect timberstones for her foundation. They poked at her with their eyes, their thoughts, probed her where she had levered the jeweled logs out of the steaming water with iron bar and brute shoulders, stroked her in the moments of the final log’s collapse from her and her uncles’ shoulders into the wagon, its mineral mass mottled in layers of iridescent crystal sediment along the organic rings of the original pine matrix. They ogled the hours she had spent hauling replacements from the sour fountains to the holes she had made vacant in the final crystallizing pools, and filled in turn those she left in the sour waters with freshly cut logs they had brought from the Kreath itself. They pried even farther into her past, watching her and all the procession of Stone-Standers who had made identical journeys through the long ages, back to the great-great grandmother who had laid the four logs Brital selected from their petrifying submersion, as ever-observed as her descendant._

_Brital felt their caressing of all these things, and more; their thoughts slid_ up _her life as well, into the future, where they pushed her arms into place as she positioned the timberstones, as they placed her hands on the chisel and, immaterially, made her to thrust and strike, shaping the key-column for the beams’ seats. They pushed deeper, tracing all the key-columns and timberstones she would stand, all the stone she would live, the children she would sire and predestine to the standing of stone. However she glowered, there was no real shield against this involuntary intimacy, except the determination that their foreknowledge, at least, would be made false._

_Her father twitched the reins, and the team turned off down a minor lane toward the build site, their feathery fetlocks trailing on the grid-bound cobble stream. She had laid those stones herself the previous spring, carrying the rounded rocks from their beds in the slow bends of the Standing stream along their cliff quarry. They had been laid there to smooth in the waters by one Stone-Stander or another centuries before, much like the timberstones in the Eastmarch hot springs; they had always taken shattered or ruined blocks up to the rapids outside the tomb in the mountain to smooth and polish in the rush, the better for the grip of hooves. Generations of stone; generations of Stone-Standers._

_They drew up to the build and Brital stepped down from the wagon to begin untying the hides covering the beams in the back, her uncles’ callused hands helping. At least there, surrounded by fractal fountains of pine and fir and spruce, there were fewer people to reflect her in their thoughts, the edges of their conception complicated by vegetation. Of course her occupation was its clearance, but then the geometries of needle and branch were, in a sense, already laid bare by the grid of their planting. She could see in those trees and shrubs the same iteration of identity she saw in the inhabitants of Falkreath – the only difference was that they, to her knowledge, could not see_ hers _._

_The four of them carried the glinting timberstones onto the foundation. She had prepared the way by felling the eight firs growing within where the walls would be, burning their trunks and roots with coals to soft ash through several long, quiet weeks, and shoveling the soil and soot into what would be the goodwife’s garden. Her work had left bare the flat slate roof of an earlier Falkreath, laid acrosssome ancestor’s chosen timberstones. In the center had protruded the top of the column they had erected as the spine of the buried structure._

_Brital’s own column, of blue-speckled granite as wide as her shoulders and twice as tall as her father, cut by her own chisel from their cliffs, smooth and sharply angled as the corner forms themselves, stood atop that ancient statement, alone save for the four pillars on each side that would, together, support the walls. The timberstones would be set in the column and in those pillars to form the basic frame, to be capped and held in place by short ends of stone cut from the same column._

_Though this was her first foundation, her first build acting as the master mason, she was not without assistance. It was not work one could safely do alone, as much as she would have preferred it; it was only customary that her father and her uncles would help her lift and position the beams onto their temporary lumber frames against the column, so she could mark their outlines on the granite with a lump of chalk, or that they would help to load and unload the raw blocks she would split down to size for the walls, or that they would help to puzzle and place them when it came time. Like all the world, it seemed to Brital, their behavior was conventional, a tacit adherence to arbitrary rules whose existence she could only assume through observation of those who seemed to understand them innately._

_The sun had sunk beneath the peaks of the Reach by the time the stones were in place and Brital was ready to begin chiseling their settings in the key-column. The mists of Ilinalta drained into the valley of Kreath as the day’s warmth retreated, confusing the light and lending the timberstones a phosphorescent sheen, oiling the turquoise and cobalt rings._

_“Time ter head home, Brital child,” her father called up to her atop the column, mallet and chisel in her hands. Her uncles waited in the back of the wagon, lying out atop the hide to watch the skies. They sang lowly, a chant to Kyne and her tongues._

_“Ta moonne, they sheen heavy ternight,” Brital said, gesturing at the waxing moons rising in the north. “And ta wyrmwind chust as bright as ta sun, last three dayye. Myn work I have.”_

_“Yer rest ye have too,” her father replied, plane-faced. “Crooken work by crooken light, Brital.”_

_Her mouth thinned, and she turned her shoulder toward him and set the chisel against the granite. A bigger chisel, to begin with, for clearing out the cavity before refining its edge to the contour of the beam. She tapped lightly with the steel mallet, and the chisel’s rough teeth sent shards of stone skittering across their column._

_“Brital.”_

_“If ye must I do this, then myn work will it be, done myn way.” She flicked him a glance. He only looked at her, and she bent to her work. A few moments later, she heard the squeak of the wagon’s axles, and looked up to watch them rattle away along the dark cobbles. She had not really expected him to allow it. Family always felt the need to control her decisions, even when they did not affect anyone but her. They were all about ‘her own good.’_

_Moonlight slid over her as she tapped at her chisel and bit into the stone, a pale blush passing in patches as stingy clouds slithered across the ash and scarlet moons. The wyrmwinds woke, and wriggled through the sky, twisting bands of radiance in green and blue, flipping their narrow sides like the egg eels of the acid pits. Dragon breath, they said, of wyrms long dead but yet undying. Their glow, too, rippled across her, suffusing the mists with currents of colour, as they swam ribbons around the black bulk of High Hrothgar and the Throat of the World. The echoes of the Greybeards’ calls rumbled thunder against the mountains. They stood there on the mountain, chanting trances into the wyrmwinds, elsewise the vengeance of dragonkind would obliterate all of Skyrim. Or at least that was what her mother had told her._

_She blew at the stone to scatter the dust, wiping away the larger fragments with her fingers. She had always loved to sit outside at night and listen to the monks of the mountain sing their protective devotions to Kyne. It had seemed they were the only ones who cared to listen rather than look, to choose silence except against those who came to shout down the weak. She switched to a smaller, finer chisel from her belt, for smoothing out the setting; enough for a snug fit, but not so smooth that it would lose grip in the pull of earth shifting with the years._

_She concentrated on the rhythm of her tapping, rather than the voices of the Greybeards. Theirs were liars’ tongues, that_ spoke _of silence; and more, that_ told _of need. Brital had no schooling – she was a Stone-Stander; masonry was all she need to know – but her family’s work went stone by stone with the Kreath’s worship of Arkay, and the old priest always inserted as much history and religion as he could into his birth and death and foundation rites. She knew well enough that the monks felt plenty entitled to speech when it came to the naming of Ysmirs and Emperors, and no responsibility for their anointed’s deeds._

_The first setting was done, smoothed and ready for its timberstone, and Brital moved to the second. The taps of her mallet and chisel demarcated the night, witnessed in whisper by the winds and in glint by the moons. The Greybeards on their mountain, talking to the skies, listening to the winds. Always listening, taking in the sounds of Skyrim with their holy breath, pulling at the facts of her, the shape of her flesh, the warmth of her lungs, the timbre of her tongue. Falkreath’s priest was no Nord, but he believed everyone should know their heritage, so she knew that they waited and listened still for the sound of Ysmir to return again. Their ears scoured all Skyrim in silence, more insidious and secret than the mirrored gaze of the sun but no less of an itch in Brital’s soul – for, their silence imperfect, who could say of what they would someday choose to speak, having heard so much?_

_But by eighteen, Brital had learned something of how to ignore such things. Like the waves of moonlight and ripples of wyrmwind glow passed over her skin in the night, she allowed the reflected scrutiny of the sun and invisible observation of the Greybeards to pass over her life, as she allowed the piled lines of a thousand Falkreath’s to contain her, its scrutinized prisoner and yet agent of that social matrix’s own reproduction. Mallet struck chisel and blade bit the stone beneath the ripples of the world’s sinusoidal awareness; night passed by day and day by night over Brital’s caved countenance as she set the timberstones in their slots and set to the shaping of blocks, to frame the next generation. With light taps of hammer and steel she outlined the edges of her design onto the ox-drawn blocks her uncles brought her under the dapple of clouds and organic iteration, and, with no greater force, split them asunder along her sight. Hue, shade, pitch, volume, and timbre passed over her as the weeks wore, but she knew only line; those she split and assembled into the walls of the new home, intersecting dependently with the central column and its underlay of foundational Falkreaths, and the fractal lines of the forest that she obliterated in so doing, the secret needled angles of the world’s genetic geometry. With each corner she cut she buried her reasons for enduring all this that was loathsome to her, her consolatory golden cache below perception._

_With a month the walls stood finished in the forest, a nest of angles and edges shaped dry, mortar-less stone set so sharply there was barely a crack for a draft to hear through. There was still the roof to be done, of course, and the inner paneling of hemlock, stuffed behind with straw and bark to hold in warmth. Flammable, but the Kreath was too wet for that to be of much concern. The hearth and chimney were laid, in front of the central column, and bubbled double-paned glass set in the windows. All the stonemason’s work was through; it was ready for the carpenters. But first it would be blessed, and double so; as Brital’s first build, the normal feast and ceremony would be doubled in honor of her mastery._

_She walked with her father beneath the counterbalanced archways and polished timberstones. They glinted like glaciers and flames. He ran his rough hands over the fitted stones, felt at the jois of the settled slate beneath their feet. It was their final walkthrough before Brital’s true approval as a Stone-Stander, a week before the celebration would take place._

_“Good first go,” he said as they returned to the key-column, the essential crux of the space. “An’ yer next’ll be better.”_

_He was afraid. In twelve years, Brital had already become a better mason than he. Her days and nights had been passed on little else but the splitting and setting of stone. Her focus unnerved him; her exactness and efficiency made him flinch beneath his skin._

_“There ent gonna be another one, da,” she said. She looked at the column rather than his face; she knew he would be crunched with confusion. The speckled face of the stone was marked in chalk with the names of the Jarl’s son, and his wife, and her wife, who would take the home when it was done. A tracing, of course; Brital could not read._

_“What in the blueberry bear hell do yer mean?”_

_“Not a single more herebouts, at least.” She rolled her strong shoulders in her shirt. “I’m leavin’ Kreath, Engar. After ta blessin’.”_

_“Don’ fuck around, girlie. Come on, let’s go on home.”_

_“I ent fuckin’ around. I’m leavin’ the Kreath, for good.”_

_“Donae lie to me, girl. Are ye on after Hrothgar again, after so long?”_

_“No, Engar. The Greybeardde get none of me. I will to mason in Whiterun, or Markarth. They have need of repairin’ in stone always, I figure.”_

_“So what of that, eh? We got plenty and enough stone masonin’ right here in the Kreath.”_

_“Ye don’t get ter know why. I’m gonna be masonin’, ent I? The Stone-Stander way? That’s enough fer ye, an’ don’ think it ent.”_

_For the first time, she met his grey eyes, wrinkled and bent with consternation. She did not care; she was giving him enough already._

_“It ent the Stone-Stander way outside of Kreath, Brital! Godde, ye talke like ye don’t even_ want _the stone!”_

_“I donae want the stone, Engar!” she snapped. “Ye think I like this work? No! Bloody Stone-Standerre and their creepin’ linne! Bloody humanne and their fuckin’ boxxe! Fuck houses! Fuck walls! Fuck masonin’ an’ all yer human rulle.”_

_“By hell, Brital, what are ye sayin’! If ye hate the stone so much, where did all those yearre in the yard come from? Ye barely left these last ten yearre! How many blockke under yer chisel? Why? What are ye sayin’, Brital?”_

_“I ent gotta explain mynself ter ye,” Brital said. “I’ll do what ye want, but ye ent gotta say about where.”_

_“I think I bloody well do, bint.” He seized her by the arms and pushed her back against the column. “I try ter be an understandin’ father, girlie. Girlie! I ent never questioned that, now have I? When plenty of men in this town poured ye over plenty a mug of mead since ye took to ta skirrte when wee, and plenty of ‘em I broke teeth fer when they came a lustin’ after yer tight ass. It ent make no difference ter me – yer a Stone-Stander, and I’ll protect ye nae matter who ye are. Stendarr knows ye got the muscle of a man if not ta will ter fuck. Ye cut stone as well as any one of us, and there are yearre for ye ta find some other woman ter coax yer cock and ter bear ye Stone-Standerre childde. By all of me, ye can choose a pussied man or a cat fer all I care, but ye cannae leave the Kreath or set aside the stone! Godde, girlie! This is yer blood and bone, and the Kreath’s too! Ye cannae set it aside!”_

_Brital stared past him, silent. Tears burned in her eyes; her jaw convulsed like a throttling snake. Her father stepped back, released her bruised biceps. He implored her to meet his eyes; she stared straight through him._

_“Ye know why ye cannae do this,” he said. “Falkreath needs us. The Stone-Standerre. We are the whole shape of this place. Ye must build the Kreath, Brital. Ye must sire childde, and keep us all alive. Yer uncle are men’s men, ye know that. They cannae put up for childde. An’ yer mother – she too, she and I are too old. But ye – ye will find someone ye can love, and they’ll give ye childde, and the Stone-Standerre will go on in the Kreath. Ye must. Ye cannae put this aside.”_

_“Ye pass yer mastery, girlie,” he said after a pause. “A fine foundation fer yer work. The jarl will be pleased. We’ll have ter blessin’ next week. Sundas.” She still stared past him, swallowing hard. “I’m sorry, Brital. Ye’ll find it a good life in the end, whatever ye feel now.” With a final silent plea for her eyes by his, he left her there against the walls of her life._

_In his absence, the tears dried hot and hard in her eyes. They had been tears of frustration – frustration that she could do nothing for herself in that moment, in the face of his power. Not his personal power – she was stouter and stronger than he, at eighteen and hard at work with block and chisel – but the power behind him of mirrored minds and hidden hearing, which would muster a thousand arms against her if she raised one against their own. Let her deny her father and leave the cutting edges of Kreath and there would be no town in Skyrim who would aid her escape of duty. When returned there would be punishment, yes, but never death, never release. She was bound to propagate the Kreath, bound to the conventions of normal mortals._

_But a normal mortal she was not. They knew nothing of what she really was, beneath the silt of lines that hid her, nothing of the pains her scowls protected. They lived in joy and forced her to live in torture; they would have none of the treasure of her truth. She seized the mallet and chisel from her belt, pushing away from the key-column, crux of Falkreath’s newest foundation. Her father had made this choice._

_The tap of chisel on stone rang rhythmic through the empty home, but there was no ear to catch its import. There was no refraction of sun to see what it meant. Sunbeam and breeze passed over Brital as she outlined an invisible webwork of crossfaults through the column, where the timberstones rested, their weaknesses intersecting beneath the chalked, unchiseled consecration._

     Brital snarled as she ripped herself out of the reverie. The tree’s inky sucker yearned out at her raw cheeks, pining to pull her in again to the could-be past. She pushed away, her belly roiling with rotted fate, and staggered on into the tangled forest, only to be subsumed once more.


End file.
